COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

Liberals are very much up in arms at John Kerry's cool reception at the National Guard Officer's Association conference in Las Vegas. They're pulling their hair out! And of course, they're blaming it upon us Guard officers, who must be naive, stupid, and hoodwinked.

It's amazing how often liberal rhetoric predicates the ignorance of the American people.

At any rate, here's Slate's William Saletan, looking down his nose at us poor guardsmen even as he displays the rankest ignorance regarding the history and role of the National Guard.

The Guard's primary purpose has traditionally been homeland security.

Wrong. That is only true of our state missions. But most units only spend one assembly out of twelve training for their state missions. The fact is that the majority of combat units in the Army are in the National Guard.

I'm not talking truck drivers. Support units are more common in the Reserves. I'm talking about killers: infantry. Armor. Artillery. What in the world is a battalion of 155mm guns or MLRS rockets going to do for homeland security?

Guard units are trained and organized to fight with an armed enemy on the battlefield. Homeland security has never been the primary focus of national guardsmen.

Indeed, thousands of National Guard units--entire divisions--were called up for the Spanish American War and the 1st world war. The 29th Infantry Division--a guard division out of Virginia and Maryland still in existence today, hit the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. The 35th Infantry Division took more than 100% casualties as part of Patton's 3rd Army. The 100th/442nd RCT, the most decorated unit of its size in WWII, was largely a derivative of Hawaii national guard formations. And the 298th and 299th Infantry Regiments, Hawaii National Guard, served in the south pacific campaign under MacArthur, alongside my own 124th Infantry Regiment, which was in the New Guinea campaign.

The 40th Infantry Division was mobilized and deployed into the combat zone during the Korean War. And the 29th Infantry Brigade (separate) was mobilized for Viet Nam in 1968, although its soldiers did not fight as a unit, but were sent over as individual replacements.

Most of the infantry formations in the Army are in the National Guard. Traditionally, the infantry is not about homeland security. The infantry closes with and destroys the enemy in close combat. Saletan doesn't know what he's talking about.

But these Guard troops aren't being sent to fight the people who attacked the United States in September 2001. They're being sent to—and locked in—Iraq.

I'm getting pretty tired of this straw man. Nobody ever claimed that Iraq attacked the US in September 2001. We weren't worried about what happened in September 2001. We were worried about what might happen in September 2008, if Iraq had WMDs or slipped WMD technology to Al Qaeda. I guess that's a risk Saletan thinks he can afford to lose, though I have no idea why.

What does Iraq have to do with the "national emergency" declared by Bush in 2001? Nothing. The 9/11 commission found "no evidence" of "a collaborative operational relationship" between Iraq and al-Qaida. Four days ago, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell reaffirmed, "I have no indication that there was a direct connection between the terrorists who perpetrated these crimes against us on the 11th of September, 2001, and the Iraqi regime."

Saletan misrepresents the findings of the commission. The commission found that Iraq and Al Qaeda were, indeed, cooperating on weapons development and procurement. True, it had nothing to do, directly, with September 2001. Neither did Nazi Germany, but we still went after them, too.

This insistence that every target of US Arms somehow be tied directly to 9/11 is beyond stupid.

In short, Bush has pulled Guard troops away from their homeland security duties to fight and die in a war unrelated to the service for which they enlisted.

Bullshit, as I've established. For example, all infantrymen--Guard or Active Duty--volunteered for the infantry. For Saletan to argue that service abroad against an armed enemy is not what a Guard infantryman signed up to be ready for is an insult and an affront to all our National Guard soldiers.

A guardsman who did less than he signed up for is coercing other guardsmen to do more than they signed up for.

Perhaps. It depends on the MOS. Take George W. Bush for example. His aircraft did not have a mission in Viet Nam, and was being phased out of service. So, just who, exactly, had to do more???? I'd like a name, please, or a duty position. I'm calling the bluff of this stupid arguement. Who, precisely had to go to Viet Nam because Bush didn't serve in Alabama?

And even if we take Saletan's postulate as true--a postulate he has no business makeing, then how can he admiringly refer to this guy in the next paragraph:

One guardsman is doing something about it. After serving nine years in the Marines and the Army, including combat duty in Iraq, he enlisted last fall in the Guard. The bait he swallowed was the "Try One" program, which supposedly lets veterans sample a year of Guard service before making a longer commitment. Two months ago, invoking its "stop-loss" policy, the Army called up the guardsman's unit for duty in Iraq and changed his one-year commitment to three years. He sued to void the policy, noting that its application to Iraq "bears no relation to the threat of terrorism against the United States."

Now, here's a clear cut case. If this soldier doesn't go, his unit will deploy anyway. And some other schmuck with the relevant MOS and rank will get called involuntarily from another unit or from the IRR and go in his place. That's how the mobilization system works. That doesn't seem to have occured to Saletan.

Most Guard officers, however, refuse to admit that their institution is being abused. They gave Bush standing ovations on Tuesday when he told them that "you're fighting terrorist enemies in Iraq" and that the war was "necessary to defend America."

Saletan hasn't established that the Guard is being abused. There are problems, yes, primarily with personnel and procurement. The integration of large numbers of reserve component troops into the campaign has been rocky. But Saletan doesn't have the familiarity with the military to articulate this case.

Simply deploying a combat, combat support, or a combat service support to a combat theatre is NOT abusing the guard. Saletan is too clueless to realize this, but a lot of Guard officers were ticked off about being underused in the first Gulf War, and distrusted the motivations of the Regular Army, whom they felt were working to keep the guard off of the battlefield, in order to protect their own budgets down the road. Back to Saletan:

Those brave, loyal, hoodwinked guardsmen. They think Bush is one of them. They don't understand that the only presidential candidate who's done the job they're doing now—risking life and shedding blood—is the guy on the other side.

I find Saletan's condescending attitude towards Guard officers --a conceitedness all too common on the left--to be particularly galling. Saletan, Let me know when you're ready to stop looking down your nose at us. I'll then remind you that we're not stupid, many of us are combat veterans now ourselves, and we can make our own assessments of both candidates, thank you.

Splash, out

Jason