DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA An American 'foreign legion' emerges
By William Astore
A leaner, meaner, higher tech force - that was what president George W Bush and
his secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld promised to transform the American
military into. Instead, they came close to turning it into a foreign legion.
Foreign as in being constantly deployed overseas on imperial errands; foreign
as in being ever more reliant on private military contractors; foreign as in
being increasingly segregated from the elites that profit most from its
actions, yet serve the least in its ranks.
Now would be a good time for President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense
Robert Gates to begin to reclaim that military for its proper purpose: to
support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies,
foreign and domestic. Now would be a good time to ask exactly why, and for
whom, the US's troops are fighting and dying in the urban jungles of Iraq and
the hostile hills of Afghanistan.
A few fortnights and forever ago, in the Bush years, the US's "expeditionary"
military came remarkably close to resembling an updated version of the French
Foreign Legion in the ways it was conceived and used by those in power - and
even, to some extent, in its makeup.
For the metropolitan French elite of an earlier era, the Foreign Legion - best
known to Americans from countless old action films - was an assemblage of
military adventurers and rootless romantics, volunteers willing to man an army
fighting colonial wars in far-flung places. Those wars served the narrow
interests of people who weren't particularly concerned about the fate of the
legion itself.
It's easy enough to imagine one of them saying, a la Rumsfeld, "You go to war
with the legion you have, not the legion you might want or wish to have." Such
a blithe statement would have been uncontroversial back then, since the French
Foreign Legion was - well - so foreign. Its members, recruited worldwide, but
especially from French colonial possessions, were considered expendable, a fate
captured in its grim, sardonic motto: "You joined the Legion to die. The Legion
will send you where you can die!"
Looking back on the past eight years, what's remarkable is the degree to which
Rumsfeld and others in the Bush administration treated the US military in a
similarly dismissive manner. Bullying his generals and ignoring their concerns,
the secretary of defense even dismissed the vulnerability of the troops in
Iraq, who, in the early years, motored about in inadequately armored Humvees
and other thin-skinned vehicles.
Last year, vice president Dick Cheney offered another Legionnaire-worthy
version of such dismissiveness. Informed that most Americans no longer
supported the war in Iraq, he infamously and succinctly countered, "So?" - as
if the US military weren't the American people's instrument, but his own
private army, fed and supplied by private contractor KBR, the former
Halliburton subsidiary whose former chief executive officer was the very same
Cheney.
Fond of posing in flight suits, leather jackets and related pseudo-military
gear, Bush might, on the other hand, have seemed overly invested in the
military. Certainly, his tough war talk resonated within conservative circles,
and he visibly relished speaking before masses of hooah-ing soldiers. Too
often, however, Bush simply used them as patriotic props, while his
administration did its best to hide their deaths from public view.
In that way, he and his top officials made US troops into foreigners, in part
by making their ultimate sacrifice, their deaths, as foreign to the American
people as was humanly possible. Put another way, his administration made the
very idea of national "sacrifice" - by anyone but US troops - foreign to most
Americans.
In response to the September 11, 2001, attacks, Americans were, as the
president famously suggested only 16 days after the attacks, to show their grit
by visiting Disney World and shopping until they dropped. Military service
instills (and thrives on) an ethic of sacrifice that was, for more than seven
years, consciously disavowed domestically.
As the Obama administration begins to deploy US troops back to the Iraq or
Afghan war zones for their fourth or fifth tours of duty, I remain amazed at
the silent complicity of my country. Why have we been so quiet? Is it because
the Bush administration was, in fact, successful in sending our military down
the path to foreign legion-hood? Is the fate of our troops no longer of much
importance to most Americans?
Even the military's recruitment and demographics are increasingly alien to much
of the country. Troops are now regularly recruited in "foreign" places like
south central Los Angeles and Appalachia that more affluent Americans wouldn't
be caught dead visiting. In some cases, those new recruits are quite literally
"foreign" - non-US citizens allowed to seek a fast-track to citizenship by
volunteering for frontline, war-zone duty in the army or marines. And when, in
these last years, the military has fallen short of its recruitment goals - less
likely today thanks to the ongoing economic meltdown - mercenaries have simply
been hired at inflated prices from civilian contractors with names like Triple
Canopy or Blackwater redolent of foreign adventures.
With respect to demographics, it'll take more than the sons of Vice President
Joe Biden and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to redress inequities in
burden-sharing. With startlingly few exceptions, America's sons and daughters
dodging bullets remain the progeny of rural America, of immigrant America, of
the working and lower middle classes. As long as our so-called best and
brightest continue to be absent without leave when it comes to serving among
the rank-and-file, count on our foreign adventurism to continue to surge.
Diversity is now our societal byword. But how about more class diversity in our
military? How about a combat regiment of rich young volunteers from uptown
Manhattan? (After all, some of their great-grandfathers probably fought with
New York's famed "Silk Stocking" regiment in World War I.) How about more Ivy
League recruits like George H W Bush and John F Kennedy, who respectively
piloted a dive bomber and a PT boat in World War II? Heck, why not a few
prominent Hollywood actors like Jimmy Stewart, who piloted heavy bombers in the
flak-filled skies of Europe in that same war?
Instead of collective patriotic sacrifice, however, it's clear that the
military will now be running the equivalent of a poverty and recession "draft"
to fill the "all-volunteer" military. Those without jobs or down on their luck
in terrible times will have the singular honor of fighting our future wars. Who
would deny that drawing such recruits from dead-end situations in the
hinterlands or central cities is strikingly Foreign Legion-esque?
Caught in the shock and awe of September 11, we allowed our military to be
transformed into a neo-conservative imperial police force. Now, approaching our
eighth year in Afghanistan and sixth year in Iraq, what exactly is that force
defending?
Before Obama acts to double the number of American boots-on-the-ground in
Afghanistan - before even more of our troops are sucked deeper into yet another
quagmire - shouldn't we ask this question with renewed urgency? Shouldn't we
wonder just why, despite all the reverent words about "our troops" we really
seem to care so little about sending them back into the wilderness again and
again?
Where indeed is the outcry?
The French Foreign Legionnaires knew better than to expect such an outcry: The
elites for whom they fought didn't give a damn about what happened to them. Our
military may not yet be a foreign legion - but don't fool yourself, it's
getting there.
William J Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), taught for six
years at the Air Force Academy. He currently teaches at the Pennsylvania
College of Technology. He is the author of Hindenburg: Icon of German
Militarism (Potomac Press, 2005), among other works. He may be reached at
wastore@pct.edu.
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