Storm-Troopers Continue to Die, Leaving Uncle Sam to Ponder the Draft... Again

In their ongoing campaign to liberate their respective homelands, the Iraqi Resistance has gunned down five more Storm-Troopers in and around Baghdad. Meanwhile the Afghan Resistance in Helmand province continues to resist Uncle Sam's baby-killing genocide, killing four - 3 who serve Uncle Sam and 1 reporting to UnionJack - along with their collaborator interpreter.

With news like this, one is hardly surprised to see Peter Beaumont's report in Britain's Observer that Uncle Sam's forces are running out of gas. He writes:

Where once the war in Iraq was defined in conversations with these men by untenable ideas - bringing democracy or defeating al-Qaeda - these days the war in Iraq is defined by different ways of expressing the idea of being weary. It is a theme that is endlessly reiterated as you travel around Iraq. 'The army is worn out. We are just keeping people in theatre who are exhausted,' says a soldier working for the US army public affairs office who is supposed to be telling me how well things have been going since the 'surge' in Baghdad began.

They are not supposed to talk like this. We are driving and another of the public affairs team adds bitterly: 'We should just be allowed to tell the media what is happening here. Let them know that people are worn out. So that their families know back home. But it's like we've become no more than numbers now...'

In the northern city of Mosul, an officer talks privately. 'We're plodding through this,' he says after another patrol and another ambush in the city centre. 'I don't know how much more plodding we've got left in us.'

When the soldiers talk like this there is resignation. There is a corrosive anger, too, that bubbles out, like the words pouring unbidden from a chaplain's assistant who has come to bless a patrol. 'Why don't you tell the truth? Why don't you journalists write that this army is exhausted?'...

And it is not only the soldiers that are worn out. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to the destruction, or wearing out, of 40 per cent of the US army's equipment, totalling at a recent count $212bn (£105bn)...

The army's exhaustion is reflected in problems such as the rate of desertion and unauthorised absences - a problem, it was revealed earlier this year, that had increased threefold on the period before the war in Afghanistan and had resulted in thousands of negative discharges.

Beaumont's report explains how Uncle Sam's forces, riddled with confusion and fear, lack the steadfastness to continue fighting His Crusade. The Storm-Troopers' admissions - rare in the world of military affairs - explain, in part, why Uncle Sam's so-called "war tsar" wants a draft. Beaumont continues:

In a radio interview, Lieutenant General Douglas Lute said the option had always been open to boost America's all-volunteer army by drafting in young men in the same way as happened in Vietnam. 'I think it makes sense to consider it,' he said....

Lute... said the war was causing stress to military families and, as a result, was having an impact on levels of re-enlistment. 'This kind of stress plays out across dinner tables and in living-room conversations within these families. Ultimately the health of the all-volunteer force is going to rest on those sorts of personal family decisions,' he said.

News like this leaves Klanwatchers like MISS BEAMISH paralyzed at the thought of serving Uncle Sam with something more than infantile rhetoric.

But she needn't worry. While Vanilla Sam has shown - over three centuries - no concern over genocide, he draws a line in the sand, politically, when called upon to make sacrifices. Uncle Sam knows this, and as such he recognizes the political untenability of a draft.