Choice America Editorial

By Lolita C. Baldor

WASHINGTON - The Marine Corps will soon begin ordering thousands of its troops back to active duty because of a shortage of volunteers for Iraq and Afghanistan — the first involuntary recall since the early days of the war.

Up to 2,500 Marines will be brought back at a time, and there is no cap on the total number who may be forced back into service as the military helps fight the war on terror. The call-ups will begin in the next several months.

The number of troops in Iraq has climbed back to 138,000 — the prevailing number for much of last year. Troop levels had been declining this year, to a low of about 127,000, amid growing calls from Congress and the public for a phased withdrawal. Escalating violence in Baghdad has led military leaders to increase the U.S. presence there.

This is the first time the Marines have had to use the involuntary recall since the beginning of the Iraq combat. The Army, meanwhile, has issued orders recalling about 10,000 soldiers so far, but many of those may be granted exemptions.

Marine Col. Guy A. Stratton, head of the manpower mobilization section, estimated that there is a current shortfall of about 1,200 Marines needed to fill positions in upcoming deployments.

Some of the military needs, he said, include engineers, intelligence, military police and communications.

As of Tuesday, nearly 22,000 of the 138,000 troops in Iraq were Marines.

The call-up will affect Marines in the Individual Ready Reserve, a segment of the reserves that consists mainly of those who have left active duty but still have time remaining on their eight-year military obligations.

Generally, Marines enlist for four years, then serve the other four years either in the regular Reserves, where they are paid and train periodically, or in the Individual Ready Reserve. Marines in the IRR are obligated to report only one day a year but can be involuntarily recalled to active duty.

To date, about 5,000 Army IRR soldiers have mobilized, and about 2,200 of those are currently serving, according to Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman. Of those 2,200, about 16 percent are volunteers, he said. A typical Army enlistment obligation is also for eight years.

According to Stratton, there are about 59,000 Marines in the IRR, but the Corps has decided to exempt from the call-up those who are either in their first year or last year of the reserve status. As a result, the pool of available Marines is about 35,000.

The deployments can last up to two years, but on average would be 12 to 18 months, Stratton said. Each Marine who is being recalled will get five months to prepare before having to report.

President Bush authorized the recall on July 26. It is the first such recall since early 2003, when about 2,000 Marines were involuntarily activated for the initial ground war in Iraq.

"Since this is going to be a long war," said Stratton, "we thought it was judicious and prudent at this time to be able to use a relatively small portion of those Marines to help us augment our units."

Swept up by a wave of patriotism after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Chris Magaoay joined the Marine Corps in November 2004.

The newly married Magaoay thought a military career would allow him to continue his college education, help his country and set his life on the right path.

Less than two years later, Magaoay became one of thousands of military deserters who have chosen a lifetime of exile or possible court-martial rather than fight in Iraq or Afghanistan.

“It wasn’t something I did on the spur of the moment,” said Magaoay, a native of Maui, Hawaii. “It took me a long time to realize what was going on. The war is illegal.”

Magaoay said his disillusionment with the military began in boot camp in Twentynine Palms, Calif., where a superior officer joked about killing and mistreating Iraqis. When his unit was deployed to Iraq in March, Magaoay and his wife drove to Canada, joining a small group of deserters who are trying to win permission from the Canadian government to stay.

“We’re like a tight-knit family,” Magaoay said.

The Pentagon says deserters like Magaoay represent a tiny fraction of the nation’s fighting forces.

“The vast majority of soldiers who desert do so for personal, family or financial problems, not for political or conscientious objector purposes,” said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, a spokesman for the Army.

Since 2000, about 40,000 troops from all branches of the military have deserted, the Pentagon says. More than half served in the Army. But the Army says numbers have decreased each year since the United States began its war on terror in Afghanistan.

Those who help war resisters say desertion is more prevalent than the military has admitted.

“They lied in Vietnam with the amount of opposition to the war and they’re lying now,” said Eric Seitz, an attorney who represents Army Lt. Ehren Watada, the first commissioned officer to refuse deployment to the war in Iraq.

Watada is under military custody in Fort Lewis, Wash., because he refused to join his Stryker brigade when it was sent to Iraq last month.

Watada said he doesn’t object to war but considers the conflict in Iraq illegal. The Army has turned down his request to resign and plans to file charges against him.

Critics of the Iraq war have demonstrated on the lieutenant’s behalf. Conservative bloggers call him a traitor and opportunist.

Joe Davis, spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars, said deserters aren’t traitors because they’ve done nothing to help America’s enemies. But he rejects arguments that deserters have a moral right to refuse to fight wars they consider unjust.

“None of us can choose our wars. They’re always a political decision,” Davis said. “They’re letting their buddies down and hurting morale - and morale is everything on the battlefront.”

Because today’s military is an all-volunteer force, troops seeking objector status must convince superior officers they’ve had an honest change of heart about the morality of war.

The last time the U.S. military executed a deserter was World War II. But hundreds face court-martials and imprisonment every year.

Members of the armed forces are considered absent without leave when they are unaccounted for. They become deserters after they’ve been AWOL for 30 days.

A 2002 Army report says desertion is fairly constant but tends to worsen during wartime, when there’s an increased need for troops and enlistment standards are more lax. They also say deserters tend to be less educated and more likely to have engaged in delinquent behavior than other troops.

Army spokesman Hilferty said the Army doesn’t try to find deserters. Instead, their names are given to civilian law enforcement officers who often nab them during routine traffic stops and turn them over to the military.

Commanders then decide whether to rehabilitate or court-martial the alleged deserter. There’s an incentive to rehabilitate because it costs the military an average of $38,000 to recruit and train a replacement.

Jeffry House, an attorney in Toronto who represents Magaoay and other deserters, said there are about 200 deserters living in Canada. They have decided not to seek refugee status but instead are leading clandestine lives, he said.

Like many of the people helping today’s war resisters, House fled to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War. About 50,000 Americans sought legal residency in Canada during the Vietnam era.

“You would apply at the border and if you didn’t have a criminal record, you were in,” House said.

He said changes in Canadian law make it harder for resisters to flee north. Now, potential immigrants must apply for Canadian residency in their home countries. Resisters say that exposes them to U.S. prosecution.

Copyright 2006 Gannett News Service

CHOICE AMERICA NETWORK

Brzezinski:

The Beginning of the End for Israel

By Daniel M Pourkesali

What a difference 3 weeks makes. You know the warmongers are in trouble when the Sunni Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, the US-backed prime minister, who until last week would not hesitate to appear in a photo-op [1] with Condoleezza Rice tells her she is not welcome in Beirut unless she demands and sees to an immediate ceasefire before thanking Hezbollah [2], a long political thorn in his side, for its sacrifices to protect Lebanon.

Bush-Blair & Company in their unison support for a barbaric Israeli onslaught on Lebanon have managed to completely turn the proverbial political table around -- on themselves that is.  Their adoption of the absurd notion of Israel acting in self-defense and continued insistence that there would be no halt to the offensive unless Hezbollah fighters are driven from the border has not only strengthened Hezbollah but will prove a boon to the anti-Zionist resistance movement in Lebanon and beyond.

Nathan Gardels editor-in-chief of the journal of social and political thought published by Blackwell/Oxford, and Global Services of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune in a recent interview [3] with Zbigniew Brzezinski posed this question to the former National Security Advisor to President Carter:  "Doesn't military superiority as a blunt instrument lead to eternal enmity, not security?"

Brzezinski responded: "These neocon prescriptions, of which Israel has its equivalents, are fatal for America and ultimately for Israel. They will totally turn the overwhelming majority of the Middle East's population against the United States. The lessons of Iraq speak for themselves. Eventually, if neo-con policies continue to be pursued, the United States will be expelled from the region and that will be the beginning of the end for Israel as well".

He then asks: "Don't the deaths of so many innocent civilians in Qana in the south of Lebanon -- like the massacre in Haditha, Iraq, by American troops -- send a message to Arabs and Iranians that the "new Middle East" coming from the U.S. and Israel will amount to occupation, carnage and bloodshed?" to which Brzezinski replies: "This is precisely why neocon policies are recklessly dangerous both to America and Israel". He then continues to explain that "today it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate the Israeli-Palestinian problem, the Iraq problem and Iran from each other. Neither the United States nor Israel has the capacity to impose a unilateral solution in the Middle East. There may be people who deceive themselves into believing that".

"Public opinion around the Arab world has reacted by strongly supporting Hezbollah and Lebanon" Rami Khouri wrote in a recent Beirut's Daily Star article [4]. "Washington is feeling the pain of its own self-inflicted diplomatic castration, as a consequence of siding with Israel".

Israel's ongoing and indiscriminate bombing of every village, road, bridge and other infrastructure, which has so far killed over 900 people, many of them children, and displaced another million has forged a remarkable unity among both politicians as well as the entire Lebanese population, whether Christian, Sunni or Shia.  Those who may have rejected Hezbollah at the outset of this crisis, are now unanimously behind it. 

The absurd neo-con invented and Bush-Blair adopted policy of waging wars in order to achieve peace will only serve to create more anti-US and anti-Israel sentiment and strengthen the resolve and increase support for those resisting the US-UK-Israel axis of aggression.