Wheres patriotism to match belligerence?
Recently there’s been a lot of talk about reinstating the draft, and the idea is clearly very unpopular. This has set me puzzling over what’s happened to the concept of patriotism over my lifetime. I was born shortly after World War I, and my generation grew up assuming that it was the patriotic duty of each generation (of men, at least) to defend their country when it was threatened. When World War II came, I went into the Army along with pretty much everybody else, and wouldn’t have wanted to have it any other way. Today from all appearances, a lot of Americans genuinely believe that our country was seriously threatened by Iraq and generally support pre-emptive wars. But the Iraq situation has stretched the Army extremely thin so thin, in fact, that it’s hard to imagine how it can be prepared to cope with any emergency that might arise. Nevertheless the supporters of the invasion are not rushing to the recruiting centers in great numbers. Furthermore, it appears that most are vehemen
