January 11, 2007
Bush , in a speech marked more for its clarity than its jingoism, proposed to the Nation that we send 20,000 more soldiers to Iraq in order to clean up the mess that can barely be described as a functioning Nation. There is really no “Nation of Iraq” at the moment; there are only vestiges. But the Bush Plan was clear and the text of the speech marked a departure from the tired speech-making tactics that have gotten us where we are.
We are now officially quagmired, as we were in Vietnam in 1968. The rock and the hard spot are waiting to crush us. An exit now would mean certain death for hundreds of thousands of people in the region; it would mean the destruction of what little is left of the Iraqi infrastructure. The violence and rage that would ensue would be worse than what pundits have “civil war”. But to surge the troops does not seem to the answer, either. We have cornered ourselves.
An increase in the number of troops serving in Iraq will do several things. First, it will only aggravate an already difficult diplomatic position while continuing to foster hatred worldwide. Second, it will strain a military already stretched to the maximum. Third, it will require troop to endure longer postings, and repeated postings with little time to recover from the stress (for which we will continue to pay for generations). Third, it will require a full court press of military recruiters in our Nation’s most impoverished areas. At least they are not (yet) being drafted to die in a war that promises them nothing.
That fact is that the military relies on new recruits from the very people of people it once drafted. Incentives, which including signing bonuses and hazardous duty pay, constitute hard currency that many of these potential recruits could otherwise not imagine. Why work at a minimum wage in a job with little potential for growth or education, when you can sign on for a couple of grand and have someone 24/7 to give and to tell you everything you need? Why struggle in poverty if someone is offering you a sure way out?
The Minimum Wage in many areas of the country is $5.15 per hour. If an hourly worker works a full 40 hour week for 51 of the 52 weeks of the year, he/she will barely enough to be above the official poverty line (around $500 above the official number), and that is pre-tax. While military pay is so low, it barely keeps the soldier in the lower middle class. Many military personnel take part time jobs at the minimum in order to stay afloat. If you earn the minimum wage and the Military offers you $2,000 to sign on, it’s like getting a 20% bonus.
The Congress wants to increase the minimum wage to $7.25, which would put a much greater distance between the full-time worker and the poverty line. While many business owners claim that such an increase will put them out of business, the reality is that it will increase their total labor burdens by between 10% and 12%. That increase means a decrease in profits, and that means the big investment firms will be unhappy. Any pushback on the minimum wage will come from these people who buy and sell stock like a bunch of bookies. In a time when CEO’s receive shameful severance packages of 200 million dollars, our soldiers live barely above the poverty line. This is an outrageous situation and a great and shameful fistful of greed that no one else in the world can understand. And it has nothing to do with the Constitution or the Bill of Rights or Free Enterprise or Free Market Capitalism; it has everything to do with greed and American hypocrisy.
The sad fact is that the war in Iraq rests largely on the grossly underpaid shoulders of the poor and of the immigrants to the United states.
Tags:
Bush, Civil War, Hazardous Duty Pay, Iraq, Iraq War, Minimum Wage, Poverty Line, Quagmire, Surge
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Posted on 1/11/2007
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