T A B L E+T A L K Jesse Helms, Oprah Winfrey, Spice Girls and other reader choices for scumbags of the year. In Headlines. A L S O+ T O D A Y When Mr. Bono went to Washington By David Corn An embittered U.S. military is embracing hard right ideologies D A I L Y+Q U O T E Clinton, Girl Scouts and the sage Dick Morris R E C E N T L Y Is Kaczynski too crazy to be executed? By Ros Davidson Yes, if the defense can turn him into a human being (01/05/98) And the losers are ... By Andrew Ross Salon's first annual scumbags of the year awards (12/24/97) Pied Piper of the Clinton conspiracists By Gene Lyons British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard thinks the president is guilty of everything (12/23/97) Death to Bambi! By Harry Jaffe Bah, humbug to deer. They're eating the shrubbery, bullying other animals and breeding like rabbits. (12/22/97) Holy alliance! By Todd Pitock Does Pat Robertson support labor unions? (12/19/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Newsreal Archives - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
		The army of the right PAGE 3 OF 3 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - And a hatred of Clinton because he was seen as a classic draft dodger. Not just that. There is also contempt for his character, the belief that he is an adulterous liar. He doesn't uphold the values that the military really admires. Clinton is the guy who's able to talk himself out of anything, the guy who doesn't have any absolute standards. What the military really admires are absolute standards, which is why you'll find military people admiring a conscientious objector, the guy who is willing to go to jail for what he believes. What they can't admire is the guy who sidesteps the draft through quibbling, through letters, through playing footsie with the ROTC and then withdrawing, as Clinton did. His attempt to have it both ways to preserve his political viability just turned the stomachs of military people. And after one week in office, he pushes for gays in the military. Actually, he brought it up earlier, when he met with Gen. Powell at Blair House before the inauguration. And had Clinton said at that point, "Gen. Powell, I know you disagree with this, but I'm giving you an order here. Figure out a way to get this done and move out smartly," Powell would have done it. But Clinton wanted the military to go along without making him push them. So they pushed back hard, and had allies in Congress. And that set the stage for a military that went off the reservation. Haven't soldiers always been to the right of center, politically? Some interesting numbers have come out in the last couple months on this. Ole Holsti, a professor at Duke University, has been polling military officers on their political views as part of a larger poll of members of American elites for the past 20 years. In 1976, the senior military officers he polled were one-third Republican. Today, it's two-thirds. Liberals have all but evaporated. You go from a conservative-to-liberal ratio among senior ranks of 4-to-1 in 1976 to a ratio of 23-to-1 in 1996. That's even with the injection of females and minorities into the senior ranks. That tells me that the white male officer corps is about 95 percent Republican. Apart from gays in the military, what effect has the issue of women in the military had on this politicization? It's made for considerable confusion about what the culture of the military should be. There was an Army colonel heading up the leadership department at West Point who was fired, among other reasons, because he talked about combat too much. The charge was that this was exclusionary against women since women are not allowed in combat, and therefore it amounted to sexual harassment. I'm beginning to understand why the military has drifted over to the Republicans. Absolutely. The gender issue really is splitting the U.S. military -- far more than gays in the military ever will. It's the dividing line, much more than rank or race. I remember I was looking at Charlie Company, 10th Forward Support Battalion in the 10th Mountain Division, a unit that deploys frequently overseas, and the issue was women who became pregnant. One officer who was complaining to me about the number of pregnancies said there had to be an agreement with the women that if they came into this unit, they couldn't become pregnant. Now that kind of rule produces all kinds of lawsuits -- a woman's right to chose, to become pregnant and so on. These women get to say they can't deploy, so goodbye. So what you have is somebody who went through all the rehearsals, but on game day, they were busy. And that really antagonized a lot of males in the unit. What are some of the other gender issues that are aggravating the military's rightward drift? The feeling that women are held to less rigorous physical standards than men are. And the belief that, ultimately, this is going result in people getting killed. Recently, the army instituted "equal effort" physical testing, which stipulates, for example, that if a man of a certain age and physical size can carry 100 pounds, his female counterpart should be able to lift only 65 pounds. And that 65 pounds amounts to an effort equal to the guy who lifts 100. Well, on the battlefield, "equal effort" doesn't matter. If, in the heat of battle, a woman is needed to carry a .50-caliber machine gun and she can't, all of her "equal effort" isn't going stop the enemy. Ultimately, combat effectiveness should be the test of a military, and it really upsets people when the test isn't combat effectiveness but some politically correct formula. What about sex? When you put men and women together in units, they are going to have sex. And when that happens, the cohesion of units declines. Those soldiers who haven't hooked up with a woman are resentful and bring charges against those who have. These guys then get busted, and often the unit loses an effective leader because of a regulation involving woman, and then there's more resentment. And the tendency of the men is to seek comfort in right-wing politics. They feel right-wingers like Rush Limbaugh are the only ones out there who sympathize with them on these issues. Is there a racial element to this politicization? Not really. You have to acknowledge that the military has done better than civilian society in addressing the issues of race. At the same time, I have to say that a hard-right military is not a comfortable place for many black and female officers. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - N E X T+P A G E+| A coup in the offing? The army of the right PAGE 3 OF 3 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Are there any other issues looming that could further this politicization? I've heard people speculate that the next great battle will be the right of the disabled to serve. I can easily see that argument being made. Indeed, in a high-tech military with a lot of computerization, a guy in a wheelchair can be the pilot of an unmanned aerial vehicle just as well as somebody whose legs work. And everybody expects that the combat skies of the 21st century are going to be dominated by these unmanned aerial vehicles. In short, this stuff is not going to go away. Do you see the military becoming more actively engaged in politics? Yes, if the military begins to take a different view of what its job is. There are some people in the Marine Corps who believe that domestic peacekeeping is a growth industry, that they are going to be deploying to American cities just as they have been to Mogadishu and to Port-au-Prince. They look back at the L.A. riots of 1992 as a preamble for future missions. Down at Marine headquarters at Quantico, Va., there's been a lot of debate and a lot of papers written over the past two years by officers at the Command and Staff College about the subject of domestic peacekeeping. Those who believe the military should get involved in such operations are arguing for the U.S. military's right to arrest people and to conduct warrantless searches. We're not thinking in coup terms, are we? I don't think anybody is talking about a coup. I think you just get an alienated, isolated military that grows increasingly contemptuous of the society it protects. You get the military saying its values are the values the country needs. That's basic militarism, and that's not good for a democracy. The role of a military in a society is not to define it; it's to defend it. Overseas, you end up sending conflicting signals to your adversaries. Ultimately, the country ends up weaker. In the meantime, if you want to get ahead in today's military, you'd better register as a Republican. I think so. I think there is a political consensus developing that basically says, "We in the officer club assume that we all agree with Rush Limbaugh; that we all have contempt for this president; that we all feel misunderstood and misused by the cultural, political and economical elites of this country; that we all feel that we're being used for hazy missions in Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti that aren't really appropriate for who we are and what we're about." A female colonel named Dana Isakoff was teaching at West Point and retired earlier than she had planned. When I asked her why, she said, "Because I'm sick of being the only damned Democrat in the room." I was out in California recently, and a Marine told me that the commanding officer of his unit would play Rush Limbaugh's show over the unit's loudspeakers so everybody could listen to it while they worked. This is unprofessional. I don't care if you like Rush Limbaugh or not. Militarily, it's unprofessional. Is the military's gripe about civilian elites at all justified? I believe the military is indeed picking up on signals from the people who run the country. They're aware that these folks -- the people in the White House, Congress, Wall Street, academia, the media and Hollywood -- tend to see them as stupid, inflexible and prone to violent and aggressive solutions. That is not true of today's military. Even the enlisted ranks of this military are more educated than their civilian peers. A 19-year-old in the U.S. military is more likely to have a high school diploma than the general population. That's because you can't get into the military these days without a high school diploma. Moreover, the majority of officers in U.S. military today have advanced degrees. You don't become a general officer without having at least a master's degree. I ran into an Army sergeant in Leavenworth recently who had a Ph.D. in history. I also think the military suspects, rightly, that when the elites talk about using military force, no image comes up in their minds of the face of a loved one, a brother, son, sister or daughter; that when Madeleine Albright talks about using military force, she's not talking about anybody she knows. And neither is anybody on the Sunday talk shows. They don't know military people, and they don't have any sense of the genuine sacrifice that is made when you send troops off for six months somewhere. Is anyone -- civilian or military -- addressing these issues? Not among civilian elites. I think they find the military not worthy of their discussion or interest. Just a small personal example: I've been told that the New York Times refuses to review my book in its Sunday Book Review section because it is not of legitimate interest to the larger society. In the military, however, there is a growing number of officers discussing this. One three-star general called me up and told me that this issue -- the politicization of the military, its alienation from the larger society and the growing gap between the military and American elites -- is the single most dangerous problem facing the U.S. military today. And it's going to get worse when the military wakes up one day and realizes that the new conservatives of America are not pro-military either. You're going to get a bitterly antagonized military when, say, somebody like (Ohio representative and GOP presidential hopeful) John Kasich decides as president to cut the defense budget by $20 billion annually. Any solutions? A few things that might be done: No. 1, I would love to see the ROTC restored to elite universities. It would have an enormous effect if kids at Yale actually knew somebody who was in the U.S. military, if kids from Yale were actually going to Somalia, Bosnia and Haiti, if the parents of kids at Yale could say, "Hey, that's my son's roommate going overseas." The presence of such kids from elite universities would also have a leavening effect on the U.S. military itself. Not everybody would be from schools like Southern Methodist University, where the kids are pretty conservative to begin with. Secondly, the U.S. military has a pretty large professional military educational establishment. My suggestion would be that whenever education is needed for military personnel, send them to a civilian institution. The reason is that while military people generally are not going to be serving in Congress 20 years from now, they should at least know the people who are going to be serving in Congress. And they will meet them by going to civilian universities. Thirdly, I would love to see the concerns of elites reconnected to the society that they're part of. It seems to me that elites by and large have withdrawn from these greater concerns. Many have moved to communities where they send their kids to private schools and only see people like themselves. They have pulled up the drawbridge. When I was researching my book and went out with Marine recruiters in Boston, it amazed me when they told me they were not allowed to wear their uniforms into the public high school in Cambridge, Mass. So they refused to recruit there because they refused to take off the uniform. They said if this uniform is good enough to die in, it's good enough to recruit in. Moreover, this happened after a controversy in Cambridge in which the right of public high school teachers to be openly gay had been reaffirmed. The recruiters said there's something wrong when you can be openly gay but can't be openly Marine. Should we bring back the draft? I think so. We could have a system like that in Germany, where the majority of people subject to conscription do not wind up in the military, but they perform alternative service. They bring meals to shut-ins, which permits those shut-ins to remain in their own homes and not have to move into nursing homes. They do things for the society that are not being done anywhere else. There are a lot of jobs in society that can be done without aggravating the unions, like city clean-up, turning vacant lots into parks, cleaning up trash, the rivers, the environment. This invests these young people in their own country. They mix with people who are not in their own narrow little segment of society. One of the beauties of the draft was that Norman Mailer rubbed shoulders with coal miners from Pennsylvania and farmboys from the South and loggers from the Northwest. We've lost that, that sense of mixing everyone up together, despite their class, race and region. SALON | Jan. 6, 1998