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Global Eye -- Cold Draft By Chris Floyd
Last week, we wrote of the brutal contempt shown by the Bush Regime toward the troops sent out as cannon fodder for its wars of profit and domination. We inferred this contempt -- still unspoken at that time -- from the Pentagon's crash program to create "super-soldiers," using drugs, hormones, wired brains, even genetic modification to turn young men and women into sleepless, remorseless killing machines. This kind of abuse, coupled with the Regime's increasingly callous treatment -- or rather, lack of treatment -- of the nation's aging military veterans, clearly indicated a profound disrespect for the essential worth of each individual soldier. They were not regarded as human beings, but as just so much biological material to be manipulated at the whim their leaders, then discarded. Again, this was all by inference; we looked to deeds, not the honeyed words of praise for "our magnificent troops" offered at whiles by President Bush and his warlord, Donald Rumsfeld. But just as foul deeds will rise, no matter how thickly they are plastered over, so too will a word of ugly truth sometimes escape from the lips of even the most practiced deceiver. And so it was last week, when Rumsfeld inadvertently confirmed the elite's scornful contempt for the suckers who serve them on the frontiers of empire. It was at a Pentagon press briefing -- the usual assured performance, with the relaxed defense chief holding forth and cracking wise before a roomful of awed, sycophantic reporters. He parried softball questions about Iraq and Korea, announced a few changes to the command structure of "Special Operations" (the significance of which was almost totally ignored by the big-time media players at the scene; more on this below), then answered a question about recent proposals to reinstate military conscription. These proposals are a political ploy adopted by some liberal Democrats to force Washington's political leadership -- of both parties -- to think more seriously about the reality of committing troops to war. It's all too easy for the elite to approve military action when the lives of their own privileged sons and daughters are never on the line. Let's have a real draft, say these liberals, one without the exemptions and dodges that spared fortunate sons like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft and almost the entire national Republican leadership from Vietnam: a war they all supported but wanted someone else -- the darkies, the suckers, the poor white trash -- to fight for them. While the intention is understandable, the tactic is unsound. For one thing, it's hypocritical; the proposers would be the first to oppose reinstating conscription if the Regime actually called for it -- and rightly so. Even worse, the ploy has introduced the idea of a draft into public discourse. If and when the Regime decides it needs forced conscription to feed its war machine, it can undermine opposition to the measure by pointing to this Democratic "support" for such a move. Naturally, any new draft would retain the old outs for elite offspring. But the Regime could bask in that rosy "bipartisan" glow so beloved by media opinion-makers. But for now, Bush still has a couple of million bodies to fling on his foreign fires before he need think about conscripting new ones. So Rumsfeld swatted the question away -- but it was perhaps the very ease of the parry that undid him. Ever the corporate pedant, Rumsfeld couldn't simply dismiss the notion of a draft; he had to explain why it was such a bad idea. His reason? Because the biological material "sucked" into the last draft, during the Vietnam War, was of such "inferior" quality. Here the contempt finally broke through the avuncular rictus. Rumsfeld explained that your quality types -- college boys, married guys, teachers and others -- took advantage of "all kinds of exemptions" to skip out on combat. "And what was left" -- not even "who," just "what" -- "was sucked into the intake, trained for a few months, then went out, adding no value, no advantage, really, to the United States armed services." Think about that. "No value." More than 58,000 of these "intake suckers" were left dead on the battlefield; hundreds of thousands more were maimed, scarred, tormented, brutalized, broken -- but they had "no value" to the "United States armed services." No value -- just meaningless biological material to be chewed up in geopolitical games. But let's be fair. It's not just American soldiers who are viewed this way by the elite; it's the entire world. This too was revealed at the press briefing, in Rumsfeld's offhand announcement about Special Operations. This, it turned out, was no mere bureaucratic shuffling, but a vast extension of the machinery of "targeted assassination." When this dread doctrine was first promulgated by Bush, we were assured its lethal powers would be hedged with strong safeguards; indeed, none but the president himself could be trusted with the final approval of such a draconian step. This was, of course, a lie. CIA officials have already begun assassinating designated terrorist suspects without higher approval, as in Yemen last year. Now Rumsfeld has extended this human hunting license to Special Ops commanders worldwide, who can act on their own bent to kill people accused -- secretly, extrajudicially -- of being terrorists. It's all of a piece with the cold-blooded corporate thinking that rules the White House. The bottom line -- augmenting the power and privilege of the entrenched elite -- is all that matters. Any biological material that gets in the way has "no value." Transcript
of U.S. Departmetn of Defense News Briefing Veterans Decry Rumsfeld's Draft Comments Special Ops Get OK to Initiate Its Own Missions A U.S. License to Kill Rangel's Draft Plan Would Spread the Burden Bush Has Widened Authority of CIA to Kill Terrorists CIA Weighs 'Targeted Killing' Missions Drones of Death Coward's War in Yemen Yemen Killing Based on Rules Set Out by Bush Drones of Death U.S. Can Target Al-Qaida Suspects Yemen Killing Based on Rules Set Out by Bush |
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