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by Joe Snyder
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts wishes he could recall a statement he made to a college audience a few days ago when, in a joking manner, he declared: "If you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq."
It is my thinking Senator Kerry didn’t mean to imply that the military is a last resort for bums and slackers and the Forrest Gumps of the United States. But uttering that statement was all outraged Republican leaders, veteran organizations and members of families of those fighting and dying in Iraq interpreted his remarks.
Had Kerry checked more carefully, he would have discovered that 98 percent of our military personnel have a high school education, compared to the national average of 85 percent. Results of the Armed Forces qualifying test, a standard intelligence examination, show that above average IQs are more common among our troops than in everyday Americans.
Despite the fact that many Americans believe that U.S. forces are taken from the ranks "of the poor and uneducated," that does not mean our soldiers represent a broad section of the population. America’s social and economic elites don’t enlist; the percentage of recruits from families with incomes of more than $60,000 is close to zero. Most recruits are from the south and southwest and most are religious and Republican. While blacks make up only 13 percent of our population, they make up 25 percent of the Army.
I don’t agree with the military’s thinking that if a nation must use human bodies to stop bullets, it ought to use bodies that aren’t likely to become doctors, businessmen and other leaders of society. This reality, which economists but not politicians, discuss openly, is easily ignored by those who grew hysterical over Kerry’s supposed slander of our fighting forces.
Has anyone noticed how few of these "outraged patriots" such as Dick Chaney and Rush Limbaugh, have ever served?
Christopher Hitchens in The Wall Street Journal has this suggestion. The bunch of colleges and universities that do not permit military recruiters on campus, should let them back on campus. President Bush should banish the law that bars openly gay people from serving in our armed forces. This compromise would correct two wrongs and provide valuable manpower for what now appears to be not only a misguided and misdirected, but also a long, budget-busting, preventable war.
"I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes." – Douglas MacArthur.