Mercenaries and The Draft

Hello, again.

You may be wondering where I have been for the last two days.

I take a two-day weekend off every week any my "off" days are Sunday and Monday. But I will be here the rest of the week.

Today I would like to write a bit about mercenaries.

You know that I am an American citizen--born and raised that way so there's no help for it.

And usually I am OK with my nationality--Americans are just people like anybody else, of course, but for the last few years we seem to have taken a very wrong turn in my opinion.

According to the received wisdom, Saddam of Iraq was building up a supply of "weapons of mass destruction" so we had to defend ourselves by invading Iraq and dealing with Saddam--which we did.

But we couldn't just walk away and leave the Iraqis without a government so we positioned ourselves to help them put one in, which we also did.

But without Saddam, the Iraqis decided to very much change the old status quo, and we Americans were on hand to be the military police of the country while the Iraqis fumblingly and with much bloodshed worked out a new government.

This whole process has taken a lot longer than most of us Americans expected.

What most of us thought would be a fairly quick "liberation" of the exploited Iraqis and a disposing of the weapons of mass destruction has become a sort of open-ended "Viet Namish" situation which goes on and on with no end in sight.

Which brings us to the theme of today's blog: mercenaries and the draft.

The American armed forces are now all volunteers (that is, fighters for pay--or mercenaries)--which means the men and women in the services and in Iraq are there because they have volunteered to be.

Thousands have now been killed and wounded in Iraq--but perhaps one reason why there has been no huge American backlash against the war is because all these people have volunteered to walk in harm's way.

I don't like the prospect of drafting people into the armed forces, but drafting soldiers would put a different face on the war--and make it a real war, something to try seriously to "win" and end.

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