Proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution to prohibit the U.S. Congress from raising a pay-incentivized soldiery and for other purposes.
Enlisted soldiers of the Armed Forces shall not receive salaries or wages while enlisted or pensions after enlistment. This amendment shall not be so construed to effect government-administered benefits authorized by the Congress during the time of enlistment or thereafter.
Enlisted soldiers of the Armed Services may choose, upon enlistment, to restrict their foreign deployments for a limit of sixty days should the President notify the Congress of a national emergency. Enlisted soldiers must give the President, or designated civilian subordinate, their individual consent for military deployments that extend beyond sixty days and are not acts of war declared by Congress, and are prohibited from deploying until such consent is provided.
No United States citizen or non-citizen resident of the United States shall be compelled to enlist in, or register with, the U.S. Armed Forces, or be compelled to continue an enlistment upon notification to the President, or designated civilian subordinate, of conscientious objection to such enlistment.
The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this amendment, including the establishment of military training divisions for soldier enlistees who select to restrict their foreign deployments to wars declared by Congress, but who may choose to lend their service for specified peacekeeping and nation-building deployments authorized by Congress, and for which each enlisted soldier gives consent to deploy.
What must be done before repealing don’t ask, don’t tell
(Originally published April 12, 2010 by the Los Angeles Times)
The military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is an easy target for an editorial board to express its moral indignation over the lies of U.S. military leaders. The Times has published several editorials on the subject, most recently the March 29 piece on retired Marine Gen. John Sheehan’s false allegations that gay Dutch troops were partly to blame for the Srebrenica massacre. The comments are inexcusable, but as a gay American I thoroughly reject the notion that we ought to be focused on repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” before addressing the far greater threats that the U.S. military structure poses to American democracy. Sheehan’s lies are far less threatening than the cavalcade of military rhetorical manipulations that all Americans, regardless of sexuality, have been subjected to for decades.
Take, for example, the late former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who did his utmost to co-opt the anxieties of the American people over the ill-conceived Vietnam War for the sole purpose of rationalizing it. Not until his 1995 memoire, “In Retrospect,” did McNamara finally admit that the Vietnam War was a mistake. Yet in 1968, when his views on the war actually mattered, McNamara was still in full co-opting mode, writing in his book, “The Essence of Security”: “This is a nation in which the freedom of dissent is fundamental. And beneath its specific protests there runs a generalized theme in most of the serious student discussion. It is the fear that somehow society, all society — East and West — has fallen victim to a bureaucratic tyranny of technology that is gradually depersonalizing and alienating modern man himself.”
McNamara, he would have his readers in 1968 believe, felt hippie pain. The Vietnam War lasted another seven years after McNamara penned those chillingly manipulative words.
Sound familiar? After President Obama’s speech last year announcing the escalation of the war in Afghanistan, a Times editorial noted that the president said the aim is “to deploy troops to target the insurgency and protect cities while building up the Afghan military and government — ‘nation-building,’ without the scary name, in a country that has studiously resisted previous attempts by outsiders to forge a central state.”
Just as McNamara in 1968 got the picture that antiwar Americans had an aversion to “bureaucratic tyranny,” the Obama administration gets the picture that Americans of all stripes are averse to nation-building in faraway places. Even before Obama’s first Afghanistan surge announcement in March 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates warned against “creating some sort of a central Asian Valhalla over there” (Valhalla is a reference to paradise). Just as McNamara endeavored to convey his sympathy for hippie attitudes toward depersonalized bureaucracy, Gates appealed to recession-weary Americans that he too is concerned about expensive, pie-in-the-sky nation-building missions.
So why do the American people so passively accept this behavior by their leaders? Has the lack of a draft since the Vietnam War created such an effective bulwark between the vast majority of Americans and those in the military establishment, who would otherwise be in a position to abuse us, that it relieves us of thinking too deeply about going to war? Ill-conceived and open-ended wars that could take our lives, destroy our spirits and tear apart our families would surely hurt us, but mere words — rhetorical manipulation from defense secretaries, generals and others — cannot.
Is it fair that those serving our country in uniform continue to be subjected — body and mind — to manipulations by the military establishment while we long ago lifted the yoke of military tyranny for ourselves? Moreover, must a decision to serve one’s country in uniform necessitate total submission to government propaganda?
A fairer approach would be for Congress to use its Article I constitutional powers to democratize the armed services by allowing enlisted members — at precisely the moment of enlistment — to give themselves greater autonomy over their own lives. Our enlisted service members should be given two distinct options: One would be to designate the enlistee’s service strictly for the national defense when Congress formally declares war on another country; the second would include, in addition to such war declarations, any authorization of military force, be it for nation-building, peacekeeping, disaster relief or any other purpose. Enlisted troops opting for the second choice would then be able to choose which — if any — deployments their moral conscience is calling them.
Repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell”? Let’s repeal our authoritarian, propaganda-dependent military structure first.
Is the war in Afghanistan worth your life?
(Originally published in the September 14th 2009 edition of the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram)
When soldiers are killed in Iraq or Afghanistan by an explosive or in a gunbattle, how many die instantly? How many have a few seconds or minutes to realize that it is the end of their life? For those, what are their final thoughts? Before their hearts stop, before they take their final breath and before their eyes become frozen, are they at peace with sacrificing their lives to bring democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan?
At a recent forum of the Center for American Progress, a more rudimentary question was put to Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke: What will define victory in Afghanistan?
Holbrooke responded by alluding to Justice Potter Stewart’s famous standard for defining pornography: You know it when you see it. As Holbrooke so ably demonstrated, the same can be said of bureaucratic arrogance.
Given that level of official arrogance, don’t expect Holbrooke et al. to even entertain the far more important question: Is each and every soldier who has those final moments of consciousness at peace as he or she lies dying?
Irony has got to be the longest double-edged sword of all time. It can be at once funny enough to induce a high and cruel enough to induce the worst forms of despair. We are in Iraq and Afghanistan to bring democracy and freedom from tyranny, yet our own democracy does not afford our men and women in uniform any autonomy in deciding whether they want to risk their lives to bring democracy to those countries.
Once our men and women enlist in the military, their lives are in the president’s hands, along with his Cabinet and the likes of Mr. “Know it when you see it” Holbrooke. The despair that results from this particular irony seems to be without any cure. So we, the civilian population, make do with make-do’s and ample doses of tuning out.
The make-do folks will wave U.S. flags and put “Support Our Troops” bumper-stickers on their cars, as if the person stuck in traffic behind them is in any position to do anything but sigh.
Meanwhile, the tuning-out folks shake their heads and say, “I said from the beginning this war would lead to a quagmire!” Having satisfied themselves with their righteous indignation, it’s on to their busy routine, which will no doubt include getting stuck in rush-hour traffic reading similar bumper-stickers.
At this stage in our nation’s history, we ought to realize the utter uselessness of labels like left and right, hawk and dove, at least when it comes to our men and women in uniform. Realizing that these people, far braver than the rest of us, can be devoured by political machines that are beyond our control, all of us can share in the same despair of our nation’s dark irony.
In his 1859 essay On Liberty, philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote: “If it be any part of religion to believe that man was made by a good Being, it is more consistent with that faith to believe that this Being gave all human faculties that they might be cultivated and unfolded, not rooted out and consumed, and that he takes delight in every nearer approach made by his creatures to the ideal conception embodied in them, every increase in any of their capabilities or comprehension, action, or of enjoyment.”
Though we no longer have the draft, the raw power of the U.S. presidency puts young Americans in uniform on a course toward being rooted out and consumed, depriving them of their right — God-given? — to comprehend with each passing year the complex world they inhabit, and therefore to make decisions about their lives based on that comprehension, not on arrogant and detached “know it when you see it” standards.
We are a nation cursed by the worst form of mental slavery if we would place primacy on one man’s ability to pursue wars of his choice over and above our fellow countrymen’s right to comprehend the world they inhabit, and thus make their own cost-benefit judgments about the use of their bodies to further the rights of humankind.
As civilians, regardless of how we label ourselves politically, we can only hope and pray that all soldiers who have those conscious final moments are at peace with their sacrifice. We are cowards in the extreme if we make that presumption for them. And until we muster the courage to change the political structures that enable our men and women in uniform to be consumed with such dispatch, we are cowards in the extreme multiplied by ten. We deserve every ounce of our despair.
Let troops choose whether to participate
(Originally published in the Sunday, June 20th 2010 edition of the San Diego Union-Tribune)
If the first Christmas really was in June, as some calculate, and we celebrated it as such, we would likely be reading today about yet another Nativity display controversy. The cast of characters would be familiar: the town council that authorized the Nativity scene on city property, the ACLU lawyers petitioning for an injunction against the city, the local grandmas aghast and hyperventilating about the war on Christmas, the secularists aghast and hyperventilating that the Religious Right is trying to shove its religion down their throats with the most pernicious of weapons. Leave it to the devil to entice otherwise good people into creating their own high-intensity dramas that focus their minds like laser beams on the trivial, while God’s children are being devoured all around them.
Imagine if the secularists realized that there are far bigger fish to fry in the effort to stem government tyranny than statues of baby Jesus. Imagine if the Christian faithful realized that multiplying fish, if you will, requires something far greater than veneration of statues: nothing less than the Holy Spirit. Imagine what these two opposing camps could achieve for the betterment of our nation if they set aside their differences every once and a while.
As Mark Mazzetti recently reported in The New York Times, Gen. David Petraeus issued a secret directive last year that authorized U.S. military intervention in several countries, including reconaissance missions to prepare for possible strikes against Iran.* It is shocking that a U.S. general feels entitled to deploy U.S. troops without the consent of the American people, let alone the consent of our “all volunteer” troops. Indeed, how can we say with any modicum of truth that we have an “all volunteer” military when the Americans signing up for military service are left completely in the dark? Since when does being a patriot and a volunteer demand blind faith in the designs of mere men?
It is high time for secular folks and the faithful to realize their common ground on matters of peace and democracy. Remember, “Blessed too the peacemakers; they shall be called son’s of God.” (Matthew 5:9)
Sadly, at present we are a nation that glibly showers our soldiers with rhetoric about how much we love them, while showing not the slightest concern for their interior hearts, and whether those hearts have the necessary freedom to balance the demands of defending our country from real foreign threats with Christ’s call for God’s children to be peacemakers.
St. Ignatius Loyola, patron saint of soldiers, gave us a prayer that is not only clarifying, but probably the greatest spiritual bulwark between the hearts of common soldiers with goodwill toward mankind, and the powerful interests in our country who see them as mere means to ends:
Teach us to be generous, good Lord;
Teach us to serve You as You deserve;
To give and not to count the cost,
To fight and not to heed the wounds,
To toil and not to seek for rest,
To labor and not to ask for any reward
Save that of knowing we do Your will.
Does each and every U.S. soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan have the peace of mind and heart of knowing he or she is doing the Lord’s will: to bring peace to this planet?
For the faithful in the civilian population, could there be any more important task than to ensure that those who serve us in uniform have a fundamental right to know if they are risking and sacrificing their lives for the will of God? For the moment Christians place primacy on the will of a Gen. Petraeus or a Gen. Whoever, over and above the will of Christ Jesus, is the moment they ought to whip out a golden calf and start worshipping.
Let us as searching Christians and folks of other faiths, as well as searching secular folks, join hands and save this democracy of ours by demanding that Congress give our enlisted troops the choice of whether to partake in all of these military operations that are not acts of war declared by Congress.
Giving our enlisted troops a choice as to which military operations they participate in would be a surefire knock against government tyranny, something the secularists should welcome. Giving our troops the freedom to examine their own hearts, and to conclude for themselves if their military missions are in line with the will of Christ, would be a surefire knock at the devil.
Change a Constitution That Turns Mothers into Mercenaries.
On September 20, 2012, a peaceful thirty-year-old mother of four small children –the smallest of whom was still being breastfed – was arrested by the U.S. Army. This young American mother, who hails from Mesquite, Texas, is now confined at Fort Carson Army base in Colorado, separated from her husband and kids. Kimberly Rivera is an Iraq war resister.
Rivera enlisted in the Army in 2006. According to published statements, she and her husband were in dire financial straits, struggling just to feed their kids. They concluded that military enlistment was their only way out; the only question being which one of them would enlist. Between the two of them, they concluded that Kimberly was in better physical health and would therefore enlist.
After her deployment to Iraq, Kimberly quickly became disillusioned with the war. Rivera even stopped carrying her rifle while on duty so as to not participate in the violence. The war, she concluded while in Iraq, was neither worth her life, her limbs, nor the lives and limbs of any others – civilian or soldier, American or Iraqi. While home on leave in 2007, Rivera fled to Canada. After five years of living in Toronto with her family, the Canadian government ordered her deportation to the U.S. in August 2012.
Nobel peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu made a public appeal to the Canadian government to allow Kimberly Rivera to stay in Canada, and avoid imprisonment by the U.S. military: the taxpayer-funded Sparta. About Kimberly, her husband and their four small children, Archbishop Tutu wrote, “these are people of courage and peace, and they should be granted asylum.”
Kimberly Rivera has a moral conscience, and ultimately that moral conscience led her to conclude that financially supporting her family by agreeing to engage in warfare, and thereby destroy the lives of other families, namely Iraqi families, was profoundly morally wrong. Because she has a moral conscience, and actually exercised it, Kim Rivera is now a piece of human junk to the military generals et al. who control her physical existence at Fort Carson Army base.
The sine qua non for military tyrants to carry out their designs of power and endless war is a soldiery without a moral conscience, or a moral conscience that is otherwise held in suspension.
Part of that soldiery no doubt can be comprised of men and women whose moral reasoning circumferences simply can’t expand beyond the sticks and carrots that are right in front of them. We’ve all come across those types in life. In politer terms, they would be called simpletons. Yet Kimberly Rivera and maybe thousands of other soldiers are not simpletons. So what gives?
Clearly, at some point in their lives, owing to financial stress, a need to provide health benefits for their children, insecurities in their masculine identities, or some other compelling reason, these men and women chose to put a moral blindfold on as they walked toward the moral cliff of war.
What makes Kimberly Rivera and other Iraq and Afghanistan war resisters different is that they had the inner moral fiber to eventually take off the blindfold. But let’s be clear: before they took off that blindfold, their participation in immoral wars was just as destructive as the participation of the simpletons.
If we are to be serious about dissolving the taxpayer-funded Sparta that is the U.S. Armed Forces, and transform it into a military that actually serves our national interests instead of creating enmity for our nation, we need to erase the now-abundant constitutional opportunities that military planners have to devise, develop and construct an amoral soldiery in part from some of the most vulnerable members of our society: men and women who are willing to walk toward the moral cliff of war without regard for whether the war is just or sensible, owing to a stress-based compulsion.
Until we can achieve that constitutional outcome – that wholesale erasure of constitutional opportunities for the militarily ambitious – the simpletons in our society, along with men and women of intellect, like mother of four Kimberly Rivera, who succumb to the compulsion to blindfold themselves, will form the basis for a mercenary soldiery; mercenaries who are far more agile in creating new foreign enemies for our nation than defeating the ones who attacked us, as the post-9/11 wars have so abundantly demonstrated.
No More Wars That Devour the American Purpose
Originally published by Patheos, September 12th, 2014
On August 8th, one of the most respected non-governmental organizations in the world, Amnesty International, released a damning report alleging that U.S. military forces committed war crimes against Afghan civilians, including torture and murder, and covered-up for the crimes. The report centers on incidents between 2009 and 2013, a time frame which coincided with the tenure of four-star General John Allen, who was the top allied military commander in Afghanistan prior to his retirement.
Allen has now been tasked by President Obama to coordinate the international coalition against ISIS.
On the need to crush ISIS before it becomes an even greater threat to global security, Allen wrote in a column for Defense One magazine, “American and allied efforts must operate against IS from Mosul in the east across its entire depth to western Syria….We cannot leave IS a safe haven anywhere or a secure support platform from which to regroup or enjoy sanctuary across the now-irrelevant frontier between Syria and Iraq.”
War-weary Americans could reasonably ask this retired general: What “we” are you talking about when describing your prescriptions to deny ISIS safe havens in both Iraq and Syria? Here’s Allen’s rather blunt answer embedded in the same column: “The whole questionable debate on American war weariness aside, the U.S. military is not war weary and is fully capable of attacking and reducing IS…”
Whatever you think of Allen’s prescriptions to crush ISIS, at least give him credit for being candid about one fact: the American people and the U.S. military have, for all intents and purposes, become entirely separate political entities, with separate value systems and life motivations.
A stark reminder of that wall of separation between U.S. civilian and soldier, oftentimes all too benignly referred to as the “civilian-military divide,” came with the recent death of 28-year-old former Marine sniper, Rob Richards, who died at his home in North Carolina on August 13th. Richards, one of the four Marines videotaped urinating on the dead bodies of Afghans in July 2011 – just days after General Allen assumed the top command post in Afghanistan – said in an interview that when CNN first reported the existence of the dead body urination videotape, his reaction was, “Oh f–k. I just knew my career was over.” In that interview with the Marine Corps Times, Richards went on to describe the dead body urination episode as “hilarious” and “another ordinary day” for which he had no regrets, adding “Being a Marine sniper was the only thing I was really good at in life. I miss it every day.”
Tyranny Dissolution Amendments 