I Cogitate

Jenna, Barbara, Uncle Sam needs you more than ever
By Bill McClellan
Of the Post-Dispatch
05/27/2005

WITH AFGHANISTAN still an unfinished job, Iraq still a work in progress and Osama bin Laden still on the loose, it is ominous news indeed that the Army has missed its recruiting quotas for the last three months. In fact, things have gotten so untidy in the recruiting world that the Army decreed a one-day stand-down last Friday during which the recruiters were supposed to refocus on the rules of recruiting. There had been too many stories of hard-pressed recruiters trying to work around the rules.

It is time, I think, that the president's daughters enlist and volunteer for duty in Iraq.

I don't suggest this facetiously. In fact, I first thought about it during the Republican convention in New York when the twins were much in the news. They had both just graduated from college and both seemed at loose ends. I might teach, said one. I might work with AIDS patients, said the other. That is the sort of high-minded talk you might expect from kids in their position. After all, their dad was running for re-election. They couldn't say they were going to hang out, which is exactly what I would do if I were a rich kid just getting out of college. What's the big hurry about getting a job if you don't need one?

So I thought, "Hey, they should join the Army! That's what kids at loose ends have done for years." But then I remembered about the war. I would not urge anybody to join the Army during a war. If they want to do it, that's one thing. But I am not going to urge anybody to do so.

Then again, somebody has to enlist. The president decided we should invade Iraq, and the people must have agreed. They re-elected him. Wasn't that election a referendum on the war? I wrote a column earlier this week in which I said it was. Many people responded and said they voted for the president but did not do so to support the war. I find that odd. To me, if a president decides to take our country to war - a war that we did not have to fight - then that decision is the overriding issue of the next election. War and peace. What is more important?

Still, I think I know why people can support the president, but not the war. The war does not touch them. There is no draft. If you're in the upper middle class, chances are your kids are ignoring the whole thing. So are you. There is no sense of shared sacrifice. We're not even paying for the war. We're putting it on the credit card. Let the next generation pay for it. In fact, we get tax cuts. The more you make, the bigger your tax cut. Somebody else can fight the war and somebody else can pay for it.

Whatever happened to that aphorism about to whom much is given much is asked? What about the Bush girls? Much has been given to them. They've got a great life, the best of everything. They're going to inherit millions, and our new national thinking is that the rich ought to be able to inherit millions without paying a penny. Let the working people pay taxes.

So it would be refreshing if the Bush twins stepped forward and said, "We've been given so much, we'd like to do our part. And as long as our dad decided that American kids should fight in Iraq, we want to step forward."

Such an attitude used to run in their family. We are familiar with George W. Bush pulling strings to jump to the head of the waiting list for the Texas Air National Guard and thus dodge service in Vietnam. But the twins' grandfather stepped forward during World War II. He went to the Pacific. Their great-grandfather stepped forward during World War I. He went to Europe. So the twins would not be acting completely against family history.

I'll bet the recruiters would love it. This war is a tough sell and when the kids who've been given the most choose to sit on the sidelines, why should the kids who've been given less step forward? For bonuses? No, the best appeal the recruiters can make is to patriotism.

The president insists that what we are doing in Iraq is an important thing and is worth the cost in blood. It would speak volumes, I think, if his daughters were to say they agree with him.

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