Someone Else's Child - New York Times

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Mon, 20 Jun 2005 15:35:10 -0700

[Zepps_News] Someone Else's Child - New York Times

 

 

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/20/opinion/20herbert.html?hp

 

Someone Else's Child

 

By BOB HERBERT

Published: June 20, 2005

 

It has become clearer than ever that Americans do not want to fight

George W. Bush's tragically misguided war in Iraq.

 

You can still find plenty of folks arguing that we have to stay the

course, or even raise the stakes by sending more troops to the war zone.

But from the very start of this war the loudest of the flag-waving hawks

were those who were safely beyond military age themselves and were

unwilling to send their own children off to fight.

 

It's easy to be macho when you have nothing at risk. The hawks want the

war to be fought with other people's children, while their own children

go safely off to college, or to the mall. The number of influential

American officials who have children in uniform in Iraq is minuscule.

 

Most Americans want no part of Mr. Bush's war, which is why Army

recruiters are failing so miserably at meeting their monthly enlistment

quotas. Desperate, the Army is lowering its standards, shortening tours,

increasing bonuses and violating its own recruitment regulations and

ethical guidelines.

 

Americans do not want to fight this war.

 

Times Square in Midtown Manhattan is the most heavily traveled

intersection in the country. It was mobbed on V-E Day in May 1945 and

was the scene of Alfred Eisenstaedt's legendary photo of a sailor

passionately kissing a nurse on V-J Day the following August. There is

currently an armed forces recruiting station in Times Square, but it's a

pretty lonely outpost. An officer on duty one afternoon last week said

no one had come in all day.

 

Vince Morrow, a 10th grader from Allentown, Pa., was interviewed across

the street from the recruiting station, on Broadway. He said he had once

planned to join the military after graduating from high school, but had

changed his mind. " It's the war, " he said. " Going over and never coming

back. Before the war you'd just go to different places and help people.

Now you go over there and you fight. "

 

His mother, Michelle, said: " I'd like to see him around awhile. It was

different before the war. It's the fear of not coming home. Our other

son just graduated Saturday and he was planning to go into the Air

Force. They told him college was included and made him all kinds of

promises. They almost made him sign papers before we had decided. We

thought about it and researched it and decided against it. "

 

Last week's New York Times/CBS News Poll found that the mounting

casualties and continuing turmoil in Iraq have made Americans

increasingly pessimistic about the war. A majority said the U.S. should

have stayed out of Iraq and only 37 percent approved of the president's

handling of the war.

 

What hasn't changed is the fact that the vast majority of the parents

who support the war do not want their children to fight it. A woman in

the affluent New York suburb of Ridgewood, N.J., who has a daughter in

high school and a younger son, said: " I would not want my children to

go. If there wasn't a war it would be different. I support the war and I

think we need to be there. But it's not going well. It's becoming like

Vietnam. It's a very bad situation. But we can't leave. "

 

I don't know how you win a war that your country doesn't want to fight.

We sent too few troops into Iraq in the first place and the number of

warm bodies available for Iraq and other military missions going forward

is dwindling alarmingly. The Bush crowd may be bellicose, but for most

Americans the biggest contribution to the war effort is a bumper sticker

that says " support our troops, " and maybe a belligerent call to a talk

radio station.

 

The home-front " warriors " who find it so easy to give the thumbs up to

war endanger the truly valorous men and women who are actually willing

to put on a uniform, pick up a weapon and place their lives on the line.

 

The president and these home-front warriors got us into this war and now

they don't know how to get us out. Nor do they have a satisfactory

answer to the important ethical question: how do you justify sending

other people's children off to fight while keeping a cloak of protection

around your own kids?

 

If the United States had a draft (for which there is no political

sentiment), its warriors would be drawn from a much wider swath of the

population, and political leaders would think much longer and harder

before committing the country to war.

 

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