Civil Reserve Corps

[rwarn17588]

<guido wrote:

Whether you or Waterboy or AOX choose to believe it, our soldiers are RIGHT NOW fighting and dying in a war and they need our support. I happen to believe they are fighting to preserve freedom and protect this nation (which apparently is working since no attacks have occurred since 9/11).

<end clip>

You can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, too. That's your right. But let's look at reality.

Apparently you don't count the anthrax mailings -- it was weaponized anthrax that killed people and screwed up the postal system for weeks on the East Coast -- as a terrorism attack.

I know the soldiers are dying. That's the reason I want the war to end and for them to come home. Making them stay in a poorly planned war and die is not what I would construe as support.

Again, what freedoms are they preserving by being there? You spout all these sayings that have no meaning in the current context.

And what does being in Iraq have anything to do with preventing terrorism attacks? Tighter security at airports, seaports and vulnerable infrastructure seems to be a much better way to prevent terrorism attacks than destabilizing the Middle East, don't you think?

[aoxamaxoa]

I might add, Bush and Cheney betray our troops who are risking their lives with insufficient equipment and resources.

http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyid=2007-01-31T002559Z_01_N30376801_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&WTmodLoc=NewsArt-L1-RelatedNews-1

[iplaw]

quote:
Assassination, I guess. What would you have done?

Assassination wouldn't have solved anything as someone from the Baath party would have stepped in and continued business as usual.  Probably one of the moxie twins Uday or Qusay

quote:
It's apparent the current way of doing things isn't working well.

Not so much.  It's like south central after the OJ verdict.

quote:
There were plenty of people, including Brent Scowcroft with Bush I, who knew that the risks of an outright invasion were outweighed by the expense and trouble brought on by the religious sects.

Not to get into semantics, but Scowcroft never banged the drum beat of potential sectarian violence before we went in.  He most definitely was in disagreement with Gulf War part deux, but to say he forsaw what we are engaged in is a stretch.

quote:
Here's a distasteful way of looking at things. Do you want a ruthless strongman in power who kills enemies but keeps the country stable? Or do you want a nation that's descending into anarchy, sectarian cleansing and threatening to destabilize the entire region?

Distasteful and sad.  Maybe we should let the two sects battle it out for good.  Sunni/Sheite battleroyale in the sandbox.  Unfortunately we have a obligation to protect Israel, and you can rest assured that whatever sect won, Israel would soon be in their crosshairs.

[aoxamaxoa]

Hmmm....what about the Persians? Should they fight it out in the sandbox?

Diplomacy may end up being the best approach in the end.....

"Unfortunately"? the Israeli's may end up doing our dirty work for us......

[Rico]

Hold on a second Ax Man.... I don't think the Israeli's are going to be needed if this  "Civilian Reserve Corp" winds up being all that I have understood it to be..

Here is a clip from an article in The L.A.Times regarding this "Civilian Reserve Corp"...

"Such a corps would function much like our military Reserve. It would ease the burden on the armed forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them," Bush declared. This is precisely what the administration has already done, largely behind the backs of the American people and with little congressional input, with its revolution in military affairs. Bush and his political allies are using taxpayer dollars to run an outsourcing laboratory. Iraq is its Frankenstein monster.

Already, private contractors constitute the second-largest "force" in Iraq. At last count, there were about 100,000 contractors in Iraq, of which 48,000 work as private soldiers, according to a Government Accountability Office report. These soldiers have operated with almost no oversight or effective legal constraints and are an undeclared expansion of the scope of the occupation. Many of these contractors make up to $1,000 a day, far more than active-duty soldiers. What's more, these forces are politically expedient, as contractor deaths go uncounted in the official toll.

The president's proposed Civilian Reserve Corps was not his idea alone. A privatized version of it was floated two years ago by Erik Prince, the secretive, mega-millionaire, conservative owner of Blackwater USA and a man who for years has served as the Pied Piper of a campaign to repackage mercenaries as legitimate forces. In early 2005, Prince â€" a major bankroller of the president and his allies â€" pitched the idea at a military conference of a "contractor brigade" to supplement the official military. "There's consternation in the [Pentagon] about increasing the permanent size of the Army," Prince declared. Officials "want to add 30,000 people, and they talked about costs of anywhere from $3.6 billion to $4 billion to do that. Well, by my math, that comes out to about $135,000 per soldier." He added: "We could do it certainly cheaper."

This is kinda like we just got the "Good News" with the SOTU speech... A true surprise....!
We already have a "Civilian Reserve Corp"...
And guess what .. We have Chilean, Bosnian, and Americans working side by side to make it work... And hell the money ain't bad...

here is a short Editorial summation by the author of this piece...

Such power in the hands of one company, run by a neo-crusader bankroller of the president, embodies the "military-industrial complex" President Eisenhower warned against in 1961.

Further privatizing the country's war machine â€" or inventing new back doors for military expansion with fancy names like the Civilian Reserve Corps â€" will represent a devastating blow to the future of American democracy.

But what the Hell does he know...

If any are interested in finding out a little more in regards to this "Civilian Reserve Corp".. Here is a



link