Baghdad on the Potomac

by Retta Fontana 

Exclusive to STR

August 21, 2007

Yahoo’s headline today read, “Bush War Advisor Says Draft Worth a Look.” It seems like just yesterday that the Decider in Chief, George W. Bush, was denying that there is a need or an interest in a military draft. For something that is not on the table, there is certainly a lot of chatter about it.

Doug Bandow recently wrote a piece on Conscription for Antiwar.com. If you visit the link you’ll catch a rare glimpse (usually disallowed by GWB’s dictatorial fiat) of American GI caskets. Despite the blackout, it seems the military is having some trouble meeting its recruitment numbers. Difficult to believe, isn’t it? Young men aren’t lining up to get their butts blown off in Iraq !

Bandow expounds a lot of painful truths: the necessitated lowering of the bar for enlistment to include felons and high school dropouts and the subsequent rise in gang membership among the troops. Yep, Johnnie can’t read or write, but he’s gettin’ his gun. (Kids, guns are bad unless you’re using them to kill for your Uncle Sam.)

As you’d expect from a site called “Antiwar.com,” you’ll find other painful truths in Bandow’s column. We have over 100,000 troops stationed in Europe . ( Europe !) Tens of thousands are currently stationed in South Korea and Japan (a nation we bombed into submission decades ago.) Active U.S. Army, National Guard and Marines today total 1.2 million. Bandow doesn’t even mention the financial cost in billions every year and it has ceased to matter to Congress or the sheeple anyway.

What piqued my interest were the current rumblings that threaten the all-volunteer military (AVF) in the U.S.  Bandow’s basic premise is that it is madness to insist on expanding the size of America’s armed forces; that it’s actually the madness du jour; merely the most recent in a long line of same. In Threatening the All Volunteer Force, Bandow quotes Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) as saying that reinstating the draft will “ensure equal representation of all economic classes in the military.” To quote my new favorite film, Let’s Go To Prison, “Shit, honkie, please.”

Yes, American sheeple are as stupid as the day is long. After all, the three scariest words in the American justice system are “trial by jury” (more wisdom from Let’s Go To Prison.) Democrats are very, very different from Republicans – really. I mean that. The windbags who got elected on an anti-war platform are all about equality and fairness, don’t you know. They are not part of the machine that just wants to get its grubby paws on your child! They insist on getting their freak on with more of our children equally! How noble of them. Leaving no child behind again, I see.

Rangel’s rhetorical effluvium stinks, as usual. Take a leaf from Bill Clinton’s book and don’t inhale on that one. It’s a steaming pile in a long and steady stream of toxic waste coming out of the unpleasant end of the thing that ate Washington .

I’m sure there are a lot of morons who will buy that particular steaming pile. They’ll believe that just because the elite’s offspring have always gotten deferments or cushy “no-show” assignments (like GWB!) in the past doesn’t mean they will weasel out of combat duty this time, really! They’ll believe that the whores in Washington are finally going to lay down their own sons as sacrificial lambs on America ’s alter of active combat. They’ll show up with their shovels, roll up their sleeves and just dig right in and haul home some free manure. They’ll do anything except sign on the military’s dotted line themselves.

Freedom is vital and the only way to stay free is to become a war slave and go and kill people? That’s what I call freedom! The freedom to serve and die for your country is in the Bill of Rights somewhere, isn’t it? Robert Higgs says, “The American people have no greater interest than the preservation of their own liberty, and nothing threatens that liberty so greatly as the U.S. state's engagement in warfare." So, the equality of conscription seals that freedom deal!

Bobbing your head to the manure that comes streaming out of D.C. is one thing. Living the nightmare is completely another. Mom and Pop are very sad indeed when their sons come home in pieces from Iraq . They were sure their god would protect their son who was fighting on the godly side of this war. They humbly tote home their free flag, all folded nice and neatly, sad but proud in the knowledge that their baby boy somehow gave his life for “our freedom.” It wasn’t to increase the bottom accounting line of GWB’s old buddies at Haliburton, really. It wasn’t a showdown with a former investment partner of the President (Saddam Hussein.) It was really us or them!

Call me Pollyanna, but I do believe that there is a limit to the manure the public will swallow. They feed on reality TV, cheap gadgets from Asia , pornography, cheap beer and welfare handouts. They don’t mind their children being propagandized in government schools or losing their privacy for the empty promise of a little security. Go right ahead and infringe on their rights to think and speak freely, they’re not doing that much thinking anyway. Their right to bear arms and their right to be free from search and seizure - help yourself, if you can find it. I’m sure those rights were laying around here somewhere – probably under the remote control. You can have anything you want. So long as you take it one little, itty-bitty step at a time, you can get away with a whole hell of lot. Witness wiretapping, surveillance cameras, signing statements, “executive privilege” labels and torture posturing as a useful interrogation technique. They feel our pain!

It’s true that all GI’s don’t come home with depleted uranium poisoning, missing limbs, brain damage and mental illness or in pine boxes, although I doubt we’ll ever know the real numbers. Private military contractor casualties certainly don’t count and dead Iraqi’s even less so. Surprisingly, no administration cares to discuss such unpleasantries.

It’s one thing for the lumpen to temporarily feel the pride of watching their sons willingly march off to “defend their country,” crossing their fingers and hoping they’ll live happily ever after. It is another thing altogether to have the military police bash in your door, taser your son and drag him off to a military prison. Initiating force creates a counter force. Just look what its done for Iraq - the parades of grateful peasants showering us with flowers have turned their plowshares into roadside bombs.

Change in the wind smells I. It’s not political hot air, no sirree. It’s the American way of life going down in flames. The “lumpen,” as Bill Bonner calls them, are becoming very uncomfortable these days. They’ve been quite caught up in the latest escapades of Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. They haven’t yet realized that they’ve been had, but they will soon enough.

The purchasing power of the USD has dissolved 97% since 1913 thanks to the collusion of Congress and the international banking cartel. Americans are losing their homes in record numbers. They’re losing their jobs and their pensions. They are in pain at the gas pump and the grocery store checkout line. With the recent drop in the stock market, over a trillion dollars have been removed from it while the Fed prints up and pumps billions of dollars of liquidity into the banking system every day. It’s like a giant bubble gum bubble that has sprung a leak – you can keep blowing, but when you pause to inhale, it keeps leaking and eventually gets ugly. This is only the first ripple of economic Armageddon caused by the inflationary practices and fiat currency of the Federal Reserve Bank with the full sanction of the U.S. Government.

It matters not that conscription is slavery, plain and simple. It matters not that perpetual war cannot create peace. It matters not that victory was declared in Iraq a couple thousand dead GI’s ago. What matters is this: I believe that there is a limit to what Americans will tolerate. When enough of us are homeless, unemployed and broke and they try to force our sons to be their patsies, to kill and to die for the machine of government, I think there will be some blood flowing and it won’t be in Iraq . It’ll be right here at home in the streets.

The movers and shakers know this is true and this is why they have been very careful not make any sudden moves that may rouse the lumpen from their slumber. However, they can only tip toe around this heaving behemoth for so long. This top heavy, debt-based economy will eventually implode, and when it does, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will never put this Humpty together again. The lumpen will have a lot of time on their hands and they’ll be looking for someone to blame. Even politicians are smart enough to fear an angry mob of stupid people.

Lynn Stuter of Libertypost.org offers this insightful peek into the creepy history of the “Read My Lips” clan and its evil ways. “Prescott Bush (GWB’s granddaddy) was not only instrumental in bringing Hitler to power in Germany , Mussolini to power in Italy , but was also plotting to overthrow the legal government of the United States and establish a fascist state here. Prescott Bush served as a Senator from Connecticut and was a partner in the prominent investment banking firm Brown Brothers Harriman.”

This certainly gives one pause when considering the inbred offspring of this ménage a trois: government fiat, military strategy and investment banking. Stuter goes on:

“Fruit very seldom falls far from the tree. In 1992, George Herbert Walker Bush, (GWB’s father) responding to a question from the late Sarah McClendon about Iraq-gate and Iran contra, stated, ‘…if the American people ever find out what we have done, they will chase us down the streets and lynch us.’”

“And just like Hitler, Bush is using fear to keep the American people supporting his un-American activities, starting with the events of September 11, 2001 . And every time Bush wants something more, another threat emerges and Congress and the American people, with few exceptions, fall in step. Yet the greatest threat to the American people, American sovereignty, the American way of life sits in the White House, not in Iraq , not in Afghanistan , not in the Middle East .”

In the last election, even the Republicans could see that voters sent a clear anti-war message to Congress by electing Democrats. What did they get? The first order of business was to take impeachment of the Republican President for lying us into war “off the table,” vote him greater powers and larger military budgets and raise the overall debt ceiling. Even the darling of the left, junior senator from NY and Full Member of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, Hillary Clinton, has claimed that an all-volunteer military isn’t getting it anymore. It seems that the anti-war Democrats, elected to end the war, really like the conscription idea. In fact, they are so busy doing the people’s anti-war bidding that they are hotly debating gay unions (as if that is any of their business.)

There is no way of knowing which will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, but break it will, and the sooner the better. Imagine - the chaos and violence that we have visited upon Baghdad will soon be ours here at home in the capitol. I believe that a return to conscription could finally put Americans in enough pain to remember that they have the cajones to say NO. It’s happened before. It’s about damn time we had Revolution II in this country. I think now could be the time and conscription the tipping point. Another revolution could very well bring us another “new and improved government,” but it takes time to organize tyranny; it should take them another hundred years or so to start eyeing up our children again. In the meantime we can enjoy a dose of the greatest freedom ever known – freedom from government.

I have a 19-year old son. The whores in Washington can have him for their war machine when they pry him from my cold, dead fingers. Conscription? Shit, honkie, bring it!