well, what you said is actually what I meant to suggest:

"What I believe I could support is mandatory government service where our youth would have a wide range of options, including the military, in how to serve our nation and their brains and energy could be used to serve needs that are not being met whether it is in America or a foreign country and in return money for a college education would be provided."

I would just imagine that many more folks would in fact be exposed to military service then now if universal service was required. No one of course should be forced to be in the military if they do not want to. But I do think folks should have to do some form of service as a rite of citizenship (with a wide range of options).

Man I don't even know what Hullabaloo is. I thought it was some old tv program that had go go dancers. And eschaton for me refers to a theological concept. And I have honest to god never read a "digby" before, whatever such a thing is. Sound like a name for a hobbit in Tolkein. But I would take you out to eat, if I could, just on the strength of your handle: derbig mooser.

"Jkalos, I'm a tad surprised you've never heard of the famous Digby."

Man, this is turning out to be as embarrasing as the other day when I didn't know about the Iraqi oil for euros affair.

*takes out clown nose and puts it on once again.*

Thats what comes of spending all my time studying logic, greek, and plato, and defending the honor of the us military :)

So there.

*takes off clown nose and puts it in his pocket for the next time he needs it*

And hey: if you haven't read Aeschylus in Greek, where have you been, anyway? Where is YOUR clown nose? Hmmmm?

comparing those two made me chuckle. MacArthur commanded the entire Pacific theater. McCain commanded himself in a jet that was shot down, and later commanded a training squadron.

truly: "Of course many star officers including Collen Powell said never again after Vietnam, and look what happened." He is the one who fooled me. If you read his books he was quite clear on the lessons learned from Vietnam. His support of Bush is the one thing that made me think there might have been something to the threat of WMDs. How he stood by and let Shineski take a fall is beyond me. I don't see how he lives with himself. He has to KNOW what he did. Though as Sartre has taught us, the capacity for self-delusion is endless (check out Being and Nothingness, a great work on that--bad faith, etc.).

lost it in Korea, all right, I'll give you that. But if you read Manchester's study of him, it becomes clear that in WWII anyway, he had his act together. His strategy of going around island strongholds and starving them out instead of doing continual direct assaults on all of them saved many lives. (Ironically, MacArthur was unpopular with the troops, while Bradley, the so-called GI General, implemented various disastrous strategic decisions that led to many more casualties than necessary.)

"Exactly, makes the decision so crazy by itself that it is hard to believe our idiot president made it. Doesn't it?"

I have begun to seriously entertain the notion, with reference to Naomi Klein's shock doctrine, that Bush and Co. are doing exactly what they wanted to: totally destablizing Iraq, and also applying a sort of in-house shock doctrine on the US Military (see all of Rumsfeld's crazy theories on how to reform it); so that they were happy to destabilize our military and make us more dependent on civilian contractors, etc. Two birds with one stone: weaken the US Military to soften it up for change, and at the same time destabilize Iraq so that we would dominate it like we did the Philippines, for generations.

RMP: "The poltical side was so intoxicating because his military performance other than being a stalwart POW, was quite undistinguished in direct contrast to his father and grandfather. He like junior suffer from I have to please my dad so that I can please myself."

I had forgotten about his daddy the admiral. And I know nothing about his Grandad.

But I can never diminish his being a stalwart POW. That was distinguished on the personal level. I don't see how anyone would think that such personal courage would qualify you to run a country, though.

But my real hero of the Vietnam war was Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson. IF you to read about a real American hero who lived up to what it means to be a soldier, check him out. When the news of his death came on the news a while back, I made my kids stand up with me (I just couldn't sit there watching about it like it was a tv show or something) while they talked about him (crazy old Dad, my kids said, smiling: but they stood up):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Thompson,_Jr.

"Finally, I don't believe any single government can be trusted to wield a non-defensive military force in anything like a morally justifiable way. Such trust is not compatible with what we've learned, at great cost, about human nature."

The only possible kind of interventionist force I can conceive of is something like a United Nations force in a humanitarian crisis where the majority of nations agree (and we would have to do away with all that security council veto crap the wwII victors imposed on it too).

But a defensive one, alas, human nature has shown us, we do need.