The recent Baghdad tragedy does not stand alone. I am
reminded, with admitted bitterness, President Bush's
response to a press query about all the soldiers
literally "picked off" in Iraq by guerrilla fighters:
"bring them on!" Those are distressing words from a
man who spent the Vietnam War literally "pickled" safe
at home. But more important is how qualified are his
handpicked desk-strategists in DoD to calculate the
effective readiness of our troops?

I ask this question because I see in Iraq laxity with
dire consequences such as I do not recall seeing in
Vietnam. If my personal comparison-- limited to what
one pair of eyes can see from one moment to another--
is correct, it raises the very questions that Dana
Priest asks in her book THE MISSION. Are somewhat
older "weekend soldiers" with their wives and several
kids back home on their minds the best troops to do
perimeter security in a hot far off country?

I intend no disparagement. They are and always will be
heroic in my mind for the way they hang in there while
the rest of us almost forget them in pursuit of
careers and creature comforts back home. But certainly
the best trained of what we have, have been sent out
in small lethal and very effective teams into
Afghanistan. To adequately train all our troops would
have taken much more time and much more money. That
raises yet another issue. Were we blinded by our
intercalated "reinventing" capacity, thus raining
massive death on our enemies with weapons backed up by
high power computers, unable to anticipate the issue
of preparing the boots for that they alone can
accomplish, of occupation security?

Perhaps the benign attitude of Balkan people had
caused Americans to misperceived the quality of
occupation training given their troops. However, any
assumption that, given the turbulent atmosphere in the
Mideast where so many are willing to become shaheeds
"martyrs" to keep US casualties slowly but steadily
rising, American "weekend soldiers" are up to the task
was dramatically devastated by the enemy's ability to
drive a Russian-made truck from the motor pool of
Saddam's defeated army full of explosives right to the
UN headquarters. So I must ask, are we less attentive
at the political level because we no longer have a
conscript army? Are the armchair strategists hired as
"consultants" to the Pentagon given free play because
the volunteer army has little political clout in
Congress?

Recently, the congealing of outspoken strategists
called "neoconservatives" have written much in press
and strategy journals about how America is to
implement its-- their term-- "imperial hegemony."
Having read much of it, I find it disturbingly
amateurish, coming from long time advocates of blood
letting who never served in any American war and from
neophytes who reached draft-registration age long
after elimination of Selective Service. One in
particular-- Max Boot-- published an article in
FOREIGN AFFAIRS that seemed exceptionally childish and
devoid of grasp of the fact that most human affairs
are very complex and thus do not lend themselves to
theoretical schematization. Particularly hollow, in my
opinion was the following statement by Boot:
"Paradoxically, increasing precision makes US
firepower more effective and less destructive." This
statement totally fails to consider the excuse used by
these scribes to justify all military errors in their
avowed use of firepower: the fog of war. Thus, the
greater the focus of destruction and the deeper its
penetration, the more informed and sophisticated must
be the decision as to when and where to use it. If we
do not have adequate intelligence or precise aiming
capacity, we are MORE destructive and LESS effective.
This is particularly an issue of follow through.
Invariably, given the massive investment of its
wealth, America is the most high tech and the most
devastating force in the world. But are we devoting
our best minds to fit such capacity? Can national
service in the military attract these best minds away
from the public sector to match our high tech weapons
with their talents?

I would recall that policy makers and their cognitive
functions caused us to "lose" to a tiny half nation of
low tech soldiers a war a decade long in Vietnam. Now,
our expensive war gadgets got us a quick victory
against a moribund army, only to have our soldiers sit
in Baghdad picked off one a day with no end in sight.
All of Mr. Bush's and Rumsfeld's glowing promises as
to what our "liberation of the Iraqi people" would
mean, have come to nothing, tells us our Iraq chief on
the ground, because the guerrillas-- in no way
popular-- we are told have free access to destroy
whatever we construct. As a result, we are told by
numerous press reports, our nervous "weekend soldiers"
are becoming trigger happy, and all their precise
weapons are leading to more destruction and less
efficiency.

Once again, paper generals who study military science
as a subfield of social science are lulled into the
illusion that soldiering does not require a grasp of
the complexities of physics. Such semi-docs as Perle,
Kristol and others, whose dubious expertise is further
brought into question by their confounding allegiance
to a foreign nation as well as by their retainers from
war industry corporations, are exploiting the "cannon
fodder" attitude many had towards our weekend soldiers
when America switched to an all-volunteer army. The
neocons seem to bet on the notion that "not my son"
has to fight will make Americans much more tolerant of
the excruciating bottomless hole into which our
weekend soldiers are thrown. And so, with the same
zealotry with which they preached a class uprising to
fulfill the Leninist revolution when younger, these
Sharon idolizing American Likudniks think they can
render US armed forces the auxiliaries of Sharon in
order to remodel the Middle East to fit his vision of
a massive Jewish state dominating all those primitive
and corrupt Arabs, disciplining them to accept
"democracy" where the vote always results in what Bush
and Sharon deem to their common best interest. In no
way can the "neocons" conceive of a divergence of
policy between Sharon and Bush. Israel and America are
so intertwined as one in their minds that should there
ever be a parting of the ways it can only be because
of those "anti-semites in the State Dept." Israel can
do no wrong, they insist, but America can be corrupted
by its "good life." So it is there task to save
hundreds of thousands of weekend soldiers from
becoming couch potatoes by sending them out to clean
the house of those filthy Arabs.

As one who was there to see what 9/11 was all about, I
join any and all ready to combat terrorism-- though it
is a bit late, after the damage was done. However, I
cannot be blind to the festering Mideast wound that
our pro-Zionist policies created. Nevertheless, I feel
that we must invest in a secure Israel and in
determined deterrence of extreme Islamic terrorism for
ultimately-- after Sharon leaves and another Rabin
takes over-- Israel will indeed be a light onto its
neighbors.

I cannot forget that the worst of the Islamic terror
is directed against Muslims. The insane radicals
consider them wayward that need purification in blood.
Despite the mass Islamic desire for a pacific Islam,
however, most Arabs will not join us in our struggle
because we allow Sharon to practice on the
Palestinians the techniques he learned from years of
deliberate study of apartheid in South Africa. We are
in effect, in the eyes of most Arabs, encouraging and
supporting Sharon's practice of a racist evil that we
brought down South Africa's white government through
sanctions and pressure for practicing. The neocons
exhibit no bones about our need to stand with
Sharonist apartheid. Many Americans passively accept
that as our historic "imperial mission," per Perle,
Boot, Kristol and many others in and out of the Bush
Administration. We are, in effect, as we did in
Vietnam, "liberating" the people of Iraq, not so much
because of our love for their children's future, as
said by Bush, but because it is best for the Israel
that Sharon would fashion with our weapons and
dollars, per the neocon fighters at their
word-processors. Implementation of such one time
Leninist-Trotsyist (remember, that was the enemy)
ravings as our "neoconservative policy," now, in the
name of our "imperial destiny" as Israel's partner,
instead of for the sake of class warfare, is a very
shabby fate to impose on our fellow citizens so
patriotic as to answer the call of the Flag so far
away in Iraq-- all the while Kristol does the dinner
party circuit in Wash DC and Perle counts his
big-bucks retainers from the arms industry in his
French coastal villa, eating the best that "those
anti-semitic Frenchies" can cook-up for a gourmandier
growing fat on the war mystery of others. A sad state
for our weekend soldiers and their families indeed.

Daniel E. Teodoru