BIBLE PROPHET SAMUEL WARNS THE ANCIENT ISRAELITES NOT TO ACCEPT A KING:

So Samuel passed on the Lord's warning to the people. "This is how a king will treat you," Samuel said. "The king will draft your sons into his army and make them run before his chariots. Some will be commanders of his troops, while others will be slave laborers. Some will be forced to plow in his fields and harvest his crops, while others will make his weapons and chariot equipment. The king will take your daughters from you and force them to cook and bake and make perfumes for him. He will take away the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his own servants. He will take a tenth of your harvest and distribute it among his officers and attendants. He will want your male and female slaves and demand the finest of your cattle and donkeys for his own use. He will demand a tenth of your flocks, and you will be his slaves. When that day comes, you will beg for relief from this king you are demanding, but the LORD will not help you."
I Samuel 8: 8-18, Living Bible.

HERO WORSHIP AND PATRIOTISM

New military heroes and heroines are emerging from the slaughter in Iraq from among the few captured and killed members of the US military. It goes without saying that our prayers and wishes are with their loved ones.

Only now are accounts from some members of the Iraqi military who survived the bombardments and escaped imprisonment leaking out through international media. We know of students who were conscripted to defend the city and now say they witnessed many deaths of civilians like themselves in battle. Theirs are some of the only live accounts of the systematic bombardment that obliterated one of the most ancient civilizations, even its museums. We have no less sympathy for the innocent Iraqis than we do for the innocent Americans. In this paper we will examine, perhaps for the first time, victims and innocent bystanders, as well as professional warriors.

It is proper to note that every one of the US military and innocent civilians like Rachael Corrie, who was killed by being intentionally bulldozed by an Israeli, made a conscious choice to be exposed to death. Rachael Corrie went at her own expense and without compensation, knowing the risk--a volunteer fired by her own conscience. Our own military members are all professionals, from the Private E-1 to the General; all are paid competitive salaries to do a job they chose. Starting salaries for recruits are about $960.00 per month plus all living costs and benefits--about 12 times the starting pay during the Vietnam police action. In addition, recruiting and reenlistment bonuses are now reported at from $20,000 to $50,000, possibly more.

Most of the Iraqis serve with no choices in the matter. Military service is not a choice in Iraq. And as yet, we have not learned how much, if anything, they are paid.

In most cases our military men have not been killed in battle, but have died as a result of error, traffic accident or friendly fire. Soldier Lori Piestewa, an Indian girl from a northern Arizona Hopi reservation, became the first female American killed in combat. A few others have been victim of the newly-encountered form of resistance called the "suicide raid."

America's new, post-Vietnam generation of warriors has, with one notable exception, lost about as many combatants from "friendly fire" as they have from enemy fire. The undeniable reason for this is that the present military has fought only against embarrassingly inferior military. But there is a more significant, less obvious reason why heroes are so scarce in Iraq.

For reasons this report will examine, our military leaders refuse to accept losses. Instead, the military operating procedure involves a massive bombardment of a presumed enemy, called "Shock and Awe," which is aimed at totally annihilating any opposition that might exist, before our military men are exposed to any significance risk. American boys and girls are more likely to be hit by our own fire than by the enemies.

Bloodless warfare sounds like a strategic success. What can be more comfortable than complete obliteration of an enemy without significant losses? Our military is probably statistically safer in the field than at home, where youth is exposed to traffic accidents, drugs, road rage and other life-threatening aspects of modern life.

But there is a longer-term problem that is attendant to riskless war, and that is that our military men and moment must be desensitized to becoming remote executioners of a virtually defenseless opponent. Many of the enemies military were conscripted youth, who were massacred in place, without so much as an opportunity to give up. What if our local police operated this way, gunning down crime suspects from afar to make sure there can never be a downed officer? We need not go further with this analogy.

US Policy dictates that military men must be willing to act as the executioners of countless civilian who are killed and maimed without ever seeing, or being seen by, their executioners. But what will the long-term impact of this strategy of annihilation be for both sides? In Vietnam we learned that continual slaughter of a largely civilian enemy put permanent scars on a generation; hospital records are filled with evidence. The vet could truthfully say he was drafted was only following orders, but that was not enough salve for many.

Israelis have learned that remote execution technology produces a nasty counteraction that grows worse by the year. They call "suicide bombers." Now a few Americans troops have experienced this desperate retaliatory phenomenon, and they will, no doubt, experience more of it if they stays in Iraq.

And finally, there is the effect of America's new style of warfare on world opinion. We are a people who are not used to being asked if we are sorry we are Americans, but travelers are being asked now. In the future we will need to have reasons for our answer. How will the image of the great bully affect our economy, travel, education and sports. What will it be like to be the world's most hated nation, branded the most brutal power in the world? A hint can be seen in the currency markets where the Euro is now worth 30% more dollars than it was before Mr. Bush proclaimed war on the Mideast. Other currencies are also reflecting the literal "crash" of the dollar.

MILITARISM IN THE LAND OF THE FREE

A "no losses" war policy is necessitated by the need to keep recruiting up, in order to have a military in place for the next attack on the next country. Recently there was talk of reinstating the draft, which was not well received. The Warmakers in charge know full well there are only two ways to keep recruiting up; one way is to reinstate the draft; the other way is to pay up in dollars, benefits and bonuses. But no amount of the taxpayer's money will keep recruiting up if the word does not get around that the "work" is unsafe.

After Day911, vacationers deserted the airlines at the first hint of risk. Millions of American youth will discard all thoughts of a military career the moment they think there is risk, or it they get the idea that they are being hired to assassinate masses of people who they are not so sure they hate! The adventurous will always enlist, but they are a small minority. The rest will have to be drafted; the history of the war in Vietnam makes this clear. The new military is sold to recruits on the argument that the money is great, the risk is low, and we only kill people who deserve it.

Our Warmaker leaders have developed special weapons to accomplish this new kind of remote, hi-tech assassination that cover the traces of annihilation of the innocent. Many of both the military and civilian "casualties" are conveniently incinerated, just as the victims of Hiroshima disappeared, without a trace. Our leaders now tell us they need more time to count those they killed. During the Gulf War they plowed thousands under in mass graves after systematically carpet-bombing dug-in troop positions.

Hiding the traces may or may not reduce the pangs of conscience, but it surely does reduce the pressure from home. So overpowering is the ordinance our military men deliver upon the "enemy," that it is impossible to ever know the casualty rate on the other side, if indeed our Warmaker leaders wanted to know. President Bush has now suggested that Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction must have been destroyed by operation Shock and Awe, supposedly without a trace.

The war "cabal" (as Ted Koppel dubbed those we call the Warmakers) does not want us to know the Iraqi death rate. The Iraq war is the first chance we have had to examine the phenomenon of incinerating the human evidence of our carnage. Two enormous "Daisy Cutters" were dropped on unknown targets near Basra, without news coverage. This was also done in Afghanistan. Daisy Cutters kill everything in their target areas by suffocation, and also incinerate human bodies, animals, buildings and even weapons in a fireball. But the bombardments in Afghanistan were more remote and not as well covered by independent newsmen as Basra and Baghdad.

US military also dropped specially-made bombs to penetrate underground instillations. What was not told was that these very heavy bombs used spent uranium warheads for penetrating concrete and steel before exploding. Nevertheless these "bunker busters" were used in populated areas without disclosing this to the public. The reason the bombs are so heavy is that uranium is more dense than gold.

The Warmakers' style of warfare covers up its own carnage. So large is its payload that every cruise missile creates a white-hot crematorium for its victims. We have seen estimates that as many as 12,000 guided missiles and bombs landed somewhere in Iraq. How many civilians simply disappeared will never be known. Who will complain? In war it is the winners who keep the books. There will be no forensic DNA searches through ruins to look for human bodies that have all but disappeared. What good does it do for Iraqis to complain of missing kin? Who will listen?

Significantly, while our Warmakers, for whom Donald Rumsfeld is a frequent spokesman, claimed precision accuracy and boasted of an absolute commitment to protect innocent civilians, there are abundant witnessed reports of massacres. Rumsfeld and the others simply lie about civilian deaths and refuse to discuss kill numbers.

Witnessing and reporting has had a high cost in Iraq. It has been stated that the death rate of newsmen exceeds the death rate for American servicemen. Most of the dead have been foreign journalist who declined to be "embedded" (muffled and censored) and were shot or smart-bombed in civilian areas by "coalition" military, while Donald Rumsfeld assured the world Iraqi civilians were scrupulously protected.

HOW THE MILITARY HAS CHANGED SINCE VIETNAM

Monika Jensen-Stevenson wrote a book popularized in the late Vietnam era called KISS THE BOYS GOODBYE: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POWs. It was an account of alleged indifference to those who were sacrificed. The term "the boys" meant our typical American youth who were conscripted to fight the war in Vietnam. The term "the boys" suggested they were typical of us. But unknown to most Americans, those who serve in the military today are not typical of us. They are not "the boys," and we need to know why not.

The end of Vietnam marked the most enormous turning point in our military history. It marked the end of an era that began in 1775 with the first militia engagement at Concord Bridge, memorialized by Ralph Waldo Emerson as the place where "once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot hear round the world." It was the era of the "volunteer." These farmers, and our Vietnam warriors who followed them, were truly the American volunteers. Those who have come later are not volunteers.

Conscription was introduced to stimulate volunteerism in WWI. A bigger war required a greater number of recruits. The draft was also, in a sense, voluntary, motivated by patriotism. The good will of those conscripted was needed to keep the system steaming ahead. Through the "Great War" (to end all wars), the Second World War ("our boys will never again be called upon to fight on foreign soil"), and the Korean Conflict ("the UN did it, we are doing our share"), a large number continued to enlist. Of these, many volunteered, instead of waiting to be drafted. By Vietnam some 75% were draftees. But whether enlisted or conscripted, all served as true "volunteers." Why is this true? Because by definition, a volunteer is one who serves without significant compensation.

From the beginning of our Republic through the war in Vietnam, few except the professional officer and career NCOs, received significant compensation for the services they performed, and certainly none were compensated for the enormous risk of death many faced. They were in this sense truly volunteers. Most sacrificed income to serve. In the Vietnam era, the starting pay in the all-conscripted army was a stipend of less than $80.00 per month; it had been much less in prior wars.

When recalled during the Berlin Crisis in 1961, this writer took an 80% pay cut. Ted Williams, the Red Sox baseball star and world's highest paid player, a WWII fighter ace, was recalled in the Korean Crisis in 1950, and accepted a pay cut of about 99%. Elvis Presley was drafted during the cold war in 1957 and nobody knows how much money he left off the table.

Mohammad Ali took an even harder course. He refused to be drafted to Vietnam, articulating his reason clearly, for which he risked prison. He was stripped of his heavyweight title and sacrificed the best years of his career for his belief. Ali later became a prophet about Vietnam in his own time, and he regained his title against George Forman in 1974.

To protect his several sons from the draft, Horton Gibson, a devout Catholic, moved his large family to Australia. The youngest, Mel Gibson, later became an American patriot in his own right, and made a movie by that name. (http://www.whtt.org/articles/000706hu.htm)

Some 38,000 Americans, most of them draftees, died in Korea; 58,000 more are memorialized on the black walls of the Vietnam memorial. Of those who enlisted, an unknown few would have probably done so even if there had not been a draft. But most would have chosen to stay home. The wounded and maimed numbered about three times those killed, and very few received disability pensions. These were "The Boys." They were our peers in every way. In Vietnam the boys killed about 17 enemies for each American lost, not counting an estimated one to three million civilians guessed to have perished.

The truth the venerable Horton Gibson knew finally got out. There was no communist threat; the war was phony props for and Warmaker bankers who maintained eager politicians to beat the war drums. The Vietnam vets went home and slowly disgorged the ugliness they had seen and the acts they wished they had not done. "The Boys" would not be going to another needless slaughter. The Warmakers know and stated they would have to come up with a new war-making angle, and they did. But first they needed a new king of military--one who they could control absolutely, and one that would not tell or balk.

The kings of Israel did not go nearly far as our "Caesar" has. Solomon predicted, "The king will take your daughters from you and force them to cook and bake and make perfumes for him."

Our" king" who we might dub George II, has done Samuel one up by putting "our daughters" in the military vehicles with the men in the heat of battle, where one or more was finally killed and others wounded. Samuel could not have convince his constituents a king would sink so low.

The new all professional military is the subject of the final part IV of this report. Background for this series include:

"U.S. Control--That Is the Goal" Interview of Professor Robert Jensen & Article by Prof. Jensen and Rahul Mahajan:5/18/2002 Outspoken Political Science professor at the University of Texas, Dr. Jensen examines American foreign policy, the War on Terrorism, and the financing of the war on Palestine. Dr. Jensen believes world control, including control of natural resources, is the current objective of American policy leading to an imperial Government, not unlike the imperial government of Great Britain from which American freedom was won. Makes a case for oil being the root of current and pending Mid-east conflict and concludes why we must return to a policy of justice and peace. Ends with reading of the entire article. Audio. 1 hr. $6.00