[Mb-civic] (no subject)

[Hawaiipolo at cs.com]

> Draft Coming, Students Told 
> By Susan Elan 
> The New York Journal News 
> 
> Friday 05 November 2004 
> 
> Reinstatement of the draft is imminent, war correspondent and author 
> Christopher Hedges told a crowd of more than 120 students and residents yesterday at 
> Manhattanville College. 
> 
> "We are losing the war in Iraq very badly, but the Bush administration will 
> not walk away from the debacle without trying to reoccupy huge swaths of the 
> territory they have lost," Hedges said. While working for The New York Times, 
> he covered fighting in Central America, the Balkans and the Middle East, 
> including Iraq during the first Gulf War. 
> 
> To regain territory lost in Iraq, it will take double or triple the current 
> 140,000 troops, Hedges said during the last lecture in a series called "The 
> Costs of War." 
> 
> The reservists and National Guard members who make up half of the U.S. 
> forces are stretched to the breaking point and need relief, he said, and the draft 
> is the only way to assemble the numbers needed. Reintroduction of the draft 
> will be made in the name of the war on terrorism soon after an attack in the 
> United States or abroad, he predicted. 
> 
> "The war in Iraq will no longer be an abstraction," he said. "It will become 
> deeply personal. In the next few weeks look for shifts in administration 
> policy leading in the direction of an escalation of the war." 
> 
> Hedges encountered no detractors at Manhattanville, unlike his experience at 
> Rockford (Ill.) College in May 2003, when he was booed off the stage while 
> giving a commencement speech shortly after President Bush's battleship 
> announcement that the U.S. mission in Iraq had been "accomplished." 
> 
> On the contrary, many in the audience last night said they had braved rainy 
> weather to hear Hedges indict the seductiveness of war and the dangers of 
> mindless jingoism as an antidote to their depression over the results of the 
> presidential election. 
> 
> "It's been a hard week and there are much harder times ahead. That's why it 
> is so important for us all to be together tonight," said Connie Hogarth, who 
> has a peace and justice center on the Manhattanville campus named after her. 
> "After we finish grieving, we have to get back to working for peace and 
> justice, and an end to this war and its killing." 
> 
> Hedges' audience remained rapt as he wove poetry, mythology, history and 
> Freudian psychology with anecdotes about colleagues lost on distant battlefields 
> and his own brushes with death. He criticized military heroic ideals that 
> thrive during war and the way war distorts the human imagination. In the fervor 
> of war the individual sacrifices thought for a false sense of belonging to 
> something larger, he said. 
> 
> "At the end of the Vietnam War, we became a better country in our defeat," 
> Hedges said. "We asked questions about ourselves that we had not asked before. 
> We were humbled, maybe even humiliated. We were forced to step outside of 
> ourselves and look at us as others saw us. And it wasn't a pretty sight." 
> 
> Those who confuse his anti-war stance with an anti-soldier position are 
> mistaken, Hedges said. "War in the end is always about betrayal. Betrayal of the 
> young by the old, of soldiers by politicians and idealists by cynics." 
> 
> -------
> 
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