Thriving, surviving: Human family must try to bring peace, prosperity

Governments since the dawn of time have sought public support for war efforts. These campaigns, even to some extent in the least democratic forms of government, always involve a drive to win and keep public approval, which in turn eases acquisition of material, financial and human resources.

Since the need for human resources always includes the need for people to fight in battles, these campaigns also have to include efforts to recruit, draft or conscript soldiers.

The Bush administration's campaign for support for the current warfare in the Middle East began with an effort to punish Osama bin Laden that chased him, al-Qaida and the Taliban into the mountains of Afghanistan. Then it jumped to the threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction bolstered by claims of connections between Iraq and 9-11.

As the story unfolded, much of this was shown to be based on false information that was, in some cases, shared as fact by people who knew better, or based on a public-relations spin gone a touch out of control. The purity of our motives, the reliability of our intelligence and the integrity of our leadership -- not for the first time -- became subject to legitimate doubt. As this cloud of doubt grew into a thunderhead, the administration's PR campaign shifted to the liberation of Iraq -- a very hard sell, it seems, to the insurgents. The Downing Street memo seems to have confirmed what many suspected.

Even more recent revelations suggest that White House staffer Karl Rove lied about his role in the Plame-Cooper-Novak fiasco. Rove's spin appears to have been a covert part of war PR that was designed, in Rove's own words, to allow the administration to "run with the war" it wanted even before 9-11.

Now the millennium-tired rhetoric of patriotism mixed with religion grows more strident each day as the support campaign for the war falls in on itself. It seems that those who support this war as just and necessary have nothing more to offer than such chestnuts as we must "defend our country," and "this is a fight for freedom," and we must protect "our way of life," for "God and country."

Given a strong case, I find nothing particularly objectionable to these age-old calls to war. But in the current climate they seem just a touch shrill and thin. Maybe, as suggested by a recent Speak Out caller, every person in the 1140th Engineer Battalion is telling the same true story of Iraq, but certainly our leaders don't seem to be doing so. Certainly our citizens are questioning that true story.

A Speak Out caller blames such questioning upon "the liberal lie-based media." I submit that this is just another tired sales tactic which, thank goodness, even many conservative Republicans have stopped buying.

Lagging support for administration policies in Iraq rests not in some lack of patriotic zeal (or in the chimera of "liberal lie-based media") but in the American patriotic zeal to question our leaders and their policies.

Ben Franklin predicted that our republic would flounder when power and wealth became the basis for elections and when our citizens stopped questioning their leaders. He might be proud of an American who would question the rhetoric of current recruitment efforts and who would point out that American troops are fighting in Iraq and that we attacked them in retaliation for something, it turns out, they didn't do.

Recruitment becomes more difficult as the credibility of the recruiters becomes more wobbly and the death toll continues to climb. Ought we not expect lagging recruitments when a thoughtful citizenry no longer remains willing to accept vague rhetorical appeals under the light of clear, cold facts?

When a draft doesn't work, governments across history and the world have turned to conscription. Sounds patriotic, no? The Associated Press says that U.S. commanders are being stretched thin by low recruitment and high casualties and that they believe our presence in Iraq generates tacit support for anti-American violence. These U.S. commanders are certainly not part of any "liberal lie-based media."

The Army National Guard, according to a story in the Southeast Missourian, is 19,000 soldiers short, while the Pentagon reports being more than 10,000 behind its year-to-date recruiting goals -- goals it has missed during 17 of the last 18 months.

Under pressure from the struggling government of Iraq, slackening public support here and continued aversion abroad and revelations about administration integrity, these reports and others suggest we are, contrary to administration slogans, seriously considering beginning to withdraw.

Blaming any of these shifts or any of the questions that might have led to them on a lack of patriotism or religion -- or, least of all, on the media or liberals or Democrats -- holds no more water than blaming the Iraq situation willy-nilly on zealots, conservatives or Republicans.

Yes, the World Trade Center was attacked by fanatics and thousands died.

Yes, the death toll among civilians in Iraq approaches 300,000 (as millions of Africans die of starvation and in their own wars and as Palestine and Israel still strive for peace in the midst of Bronze-age turmoil).

Yes, Abu Ghraib.

Yes, Gitmo.

Yes, Britain and Spain have been bombed -- not from outside and not, as the tenor of their responses have shown, for the first time in their history,

Yes, humanity must seek justice for these awful acts.

Yes, we, we who are not only Americans but also citizens of this little blue planet, close kin to millions of others. Members, not greater or lesser, of the human family, must try to bring some measure of peace and prosperity to our world. True justice must be tempered with reason and with the wisdom and compassion inherent, not in a particular religion or political party or race or species or gender but, perhaps -- just perhaps -- in the dream represented by this experiment we call the American republic.

Perhaps this effort will be quietly led by the representatives of that beautiful dream, you and me. Perhaps we may thus earn the respect of those whose hate we have far too often returned in kind when our sheer might and reasoned national will might have precluded such self-righteous self-contradiction which locks all that we might do for good into the awful escalation of an-eye-for-an-eye.

The dream, despite it all, most especially in the "living good" sense of its people, still seems to me hell-bent on thriving and surviving.

Robert W. Dillon Jr. is a Cape Girardeau resident.