Shaoken (and others)
Like most difficult issues discussed on the internet we will ultimatly have to agree to disagree since it's impossible to resolve anything.
Simply put, you basically think that being made to fight in the military against your will is wrong. That's fine, people have agreed with you throughout history. Nobody WANTS to fight a war. However that attitude is unrealistic.
A lot of the disagreement basically comes down to realism vs. ivory tower morality. A key point here being when Shaoken (in paticular) mentions treatises to prevent the level of death and inhumanity that happened in World War II from happening again. That is ivory tower logic, and it's been tried throughout history also, typically after major wars. Codes of engagement like The Geneva Convention have existed under names like Chivalry, and Bushido. Ultimatly those that hold to such rules of engagement are defeated by enemies who do not play by them. The only practical rule to war is that you do whatever it takes to win, period. As soon as you put limitations on yourself, and actually follow them, you lose. The French for example engaged according to the rules of warfare for the time against the English in an invasion they should have won. As the flower of French knighthood lined up as agreed to fight, the english just sat back and gunned them down with longbows. Massacres like Agincourt are lengendary, for a reason and at the root of a lot of the hatred that continues to exist between France and England. In Japan the Samurai Aristocracy put rules into place to try and avoid the level of massacres that occured when Japoan was unified under their leadership. They themselves were killed when they wound up fighting rebelling peasants who did not play by the estalished rules. A lot of martial arts and martial arts weapons of the time were basically gimmicks on how to kill a dude with a sword as cheaply as possible. You fight with honor, I fight with whatever works, kill you, and then say I was heroic later when I write the history books. The French say I broke the rules and comittewd an atrocity, I say shooting all your guys who were lined up with longbows was a heroic victory against overwhelming odds (and I mean hey, it's not my fault you were dumb enough to actually DO that just because that was how we agreed we'd fight).
People in other nations are no more willing to lay down and die than we would be if we were invaded. I mean if someone hit the US "Red Dawn" style a lot of us would be fighting to defend our homes if nothing else, and guess what? If they ever wanted to take the US they woul have to pretty much decimate us, our homes, and our infrastructure. The same principle arises when we invade other nations. We killed tons of civilians and such in Germany because it was the only way to actually defeat Germany and stop them. Yes it was a horrible thing to do, but that is war. Saying "well we won't do this anymore" sounds good on paper, but honestly if something happens that actually involves people going to war victory isn't going to happen until someone takes the rule book and uses it for toilet paper.
Robert Heinlan probably made this point far more eloquently in some of his books than I ever could. One of the few things they did right (even if the scene wasn't from the books) in the Starship Troopers movie was the little "where are they now, they're DEAD" speech a certain teacher gave when talking about war and morality.
I will go so far as to say I wouldn't be especially supportive of a draft to fight wars under the current moronic administration though. Simply because while I believe it's nessicary to sacrifice troops as cannon fodder at times for greater overall objectives, I also believe in spending lives responsibly. Drafting people for the clear goal of "let's erase the word 'Iraq' from the map" is the kind of thing you do. Drafting people so you can put them in a bloody hummer and have them drive down the street so insurgents can take pot shots at them and vanish into cooperative crowd cover is something else.
We understand gueriella war perfectly, heck, we arguably invented it. It's just that we're not really winning to do what it takes to win anymore. A guy is really brave when it's his life on the line, but all of a sudden if you start shooting his kids, or just mass murdering the population he's fighting on the behalf of (gradually removing his support) that's something else entirely. Oh sure, the people might resist all the harder... to a point. Eventually you either break them or you run out of people. The trick to winning is to be perfectly willing to kill them all if that's what it takes. Anyone left alive once your objective is complete is simply a humanitarian bonus.
But then again, I'd also argue that there is no real reason to get involved on the ground to that point. Gueriellas are wonderful deterrants if your trying to occupy territory. Unless we need to colonize an area (which we really don't) we shouldn't even be playing that game. Wipe out all the factories, structures, houses, etc... we can find, kill anyone we spot, and leave smouldering ruins. When we're gone there won't be anything left to be a threat and they'll be too busy rebuilding to do whatever it was that irritated you to begin with. If they continue to be belligerant just go and knock everything over again and kill another million or so people. They'll eventually get the message, or there won't be anyone left to kill and you win anyway.
Brutal, but war is brutal. Any distinction between civilians and soldiers or anything like that is purely academic in the final equasion. Just as you'd have to defeat/demoralize/break the general populance of the US to ever really beat us, we have to do the same to any other group we engage whether it be Iraq, Afghanistan, or Vietnam. The latter being a case study in stupidity simply because instead of going in to defeat an enemy we were arguably going in to defend a truely F@cked up regime that was lying to us from a civil war. I understand the initial principles (defending democracy and halting the spread of communism) but it was the kind of situation you just can't win unless you want to basically blow the heck out of both sides and colonize it to take the position (and again, why the heck would we want Vietnam as the 51st state? We don't).
As far as a properly fighting a war goes and using emergency powers and such, all I can say is that it has been done before. People tend to rapidly forget that Hitler was an international man of the year, yet we were able to quash all of his domestic fanboys and supporters, and demonize him and his activities pretty quickly along with all of the "peace at any price" isolationist crud during WW II.
As nice as it sounds for a left winger to say "people wouldn't stand for it" I think you'd be very surprised especially if the goverment had been quick off the mark.
When it comes to going to war in Iraq under false pretenses, well I don't think we did. Truthfully our intelligence agencies were gutted by this guy called "Bill Clinton" and for diplomatic reasons what we had left largely had their hands tied. His administratin largely believed that the "spy game" was a thing of the past and we could do everything with Satellites. 9/11 was a wakeup call and showed how if you don't have a man on the inside, you really don't have anything. When that happened we were running around like a chicken with it's head cut off because all of these "secret agents" people assumed were out there despite the "public cuts" really didn't exist. We didn't know who attacked us, or why. We were dependant on the intelligence of allies rather than our own stuff. This is also why rebuilding the intelligence services and the possible creation of an American "Intelligence Czar" was a big deal and in the papers. People are quick to forget the state we were in and the rebuilding we had to do.
A lot of our information about Afghanistan and WMD came from secondhand sources like the UK who pretty supported what Bush did. He was put into a position, he needed to guess at the threat, and if he guessed wrong he was going to take a lot of flak. Guessing wrong and going into Iraq however presented minimal danger to the US itself, guessing wrong and not doing anything and being hit by WMD... well... let's just say I can empathize with his choices even if I don't agree with what he did when we got there.
When it comes to things like the UN Arms inspectors, well again it comes down to how much credit they deserved. Understand that things like "The Oil For Food" program sort of demonstrated that nations involved in that had a financial investment in the region which would not be served by a war. France for example would happily pull in billions of dollars from Iraq and The Middle East as long as they were attacking someone else and not them.
Simply put the call he made to go to war was the right one, and why a lot of people supported it and didn't much care when the WMD were not found because I think a lot of people understood why we rolled the dice the way we did. The problem of course occured when instead of simply defanging Iraq and leaving, we decided to stick around to "win the peace" and engage in ongoing police actions while throwing out juicy reconstruction contracts. What should have ended with Baghdad and Tikrit as massive graveyards and our troops happily at home within a year or two turned into this extremely long cr@pfest that resulted in a lot of American deaths, time for the peace at any price media to start bellyaching, and nothing positive unless you happened to be a major corperate contractor or the politician getting kickbacks to broker deals for them with goverment money.
We didn't demonize the people in the region, quite to the contrary if anything we locked outselves into a situation where we had the left wing "peace at any price crowd" immediatly jumping in to prevent anything from the sort of happening. Overall it's turned into one of the most sensitive and politically correct treatments of an enemy culture under invasion to ever exist... even when the PC stuff is BS intended to make people sympatheitc and join the anti-war bandwagon.
Even if the goverment didn't use war powers to cause a massive information blackout, there is no reason why we needed to imbed reporters into our bloody military units so we could literally have a left winger accusing our troops of slaughtering civilians even as they are protecting the reporter...
At any rate, this is way off topic. The bottom line is we're going to have to agree to disagree.
Besides, I don't think anyone on any side of the equasion is going to try for a draft over Iraq or Afghanistan. Truthfully, we have more than enough force to handle that if we were to ever engage properly... which we probably won't.
Chances are if we do need to institute a draft it will either be for a WW III type occurance (War with China) or to go after North Korea or Iran. In such cases whether I support the actual use of war time powers like that (rather than their mere existance for emergencies) depends largely on how we're going to engage. If we for example want to institute a draft and actually go in kill people, break things, remove the threat they present, and then come home I'm all for it. Losing a bunch of drafted infantry is worth the potential cost of having some dude with a suitcase nuke take out LA or actually managing to hit Hawaii with a nuclear ICBM (which is the target North Korea seems to be aiming at primarily). But I would not support a draft so we could take over, and then try and police/rebuild a nation. A draft is for a national crisis/to deal with a threat. None of the threats facing us right now (other than a hypothetical WW III scenario) would require keeping all of those drafted troops active for more than a year or two (fairly short term military operation).
Such are my thoughts, which I figure not many people here will agree with.
>>>----Therumancer--->
