The Indy Star has an article entitled Join the military? Some parents say no:
A Gallup poll last month found that barely half of Americans surveyed, or 51 percent, would support their child’s decision to join the service — down from 66 percent in 1999.
That’s not a reflection on the military itself, which remains the most positively rated institution in the country, according to Gallup.
“A more likely explanation probably lies in the realization that military service is more dangerous today, given the ongoing war in Iraq,” Gallup researcher Jeffrey M. Jones reported in his analysis of the poll results.
That makes sense. A lot of people are willing to die to protect their country. Far fewer people are willing to die to further policy goals of their country absent a direct and imminent threat.
It also explains why the Iraq/Yellowcake/State of the Union/Wilson/Rove/Plame affair is erupting. You’ll hear defenders of Rove focus very narrowly on whether he committed a crime. But, politically speaking, whether Rove is in technical violation of a law is not the issue here.
The story is that it looks like Wilson went to Africa and found no evidence of Iraq trying to get yellowcake from Niger. It looks like he reported that back to the CIA. Bush had a claim about Nigerian yellowcake yanked from a speech he gave in Cincinnati, apparently because his fact checkers found it to be too weak a claim for the President to make. Some how, the same claim made its way back into the President’s State of the Union address. Wilson then went public calling the President’s assertions bullshit. That’s when Rove comes into the story, trying to retaliate against Wilson by going after his wife, outing a CIA agent in the process. Then the White House spends two years calling assertions of Roves’ involvement “ridiculous.”
It’s all of this stuff that has the White House in hot water. They’re getting caught behaving badly in several ways, almost the least of which is whether Rove is in technical violation of a law.
None of the Wilson/Plame/Rove stuff would be causing as a big of a fuss if Bush administration claims about Iraq’s WMDs as well as its nuclear ambitions had been born out by post-invasion evidence. The post-invasion evidence is that Iraq posed no direct, imminent threat to the U.S. There is also a creeping suspicion, increased by the Wilson/Plame affair, that the Bush administration didn’t play it straight with the American people about how much of a threat Iraq was. And, as we see from that Gallup poll, America’s trust that its military forces will be used wisely is critical to the willingness of Americans to sign up for a military obligation that might put their life on the line.
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