For years I have been arguing that we should open military enlistment to recruits who don’t have citizenship or even a Green Card. For this I have been pilloried by nativists and xenophobes from both the Right and the Left. Last year the U.S. Army finally implemented a trial program to accept 1,000 immigrants with specialized skills. The results? According to this New York Times article:
Although the program has started small, senior commanders have praised it as an exceptional success. Recruiting officials said it had attracted a large number of unusually qualified candidates, including doctors, dentists and native speakers of Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Korean and other languages from strategic regions where United States forces are operating.
“We don’t see this normally; the quality for this population is off the charts,” said Lt. Col. Pete Badoian, a strategic planner at the Army Accessions Command, the recruiting branch of the Army….
The immigrants who have joined the Army through the program scored, on average, about 20 points higher (on a scale of 100) than other recruits on basic armed forces entry tests, and they had three to five years more education, Colonel Badoian said. One-third of the recruits have a master’s degree or higher.
That’s pretty much what I expected. Yet now the program has been suspended pending an internal Pentagon review—even as hundreds of immigrants petition to sign up. No doubt the review has been slowed down by concern following Major Nidal Hasan’s shooting spree at Fort Hood. But keep in mind that Hasan was no immigrant; he was born in Virginia and graduated from Virginia Tech. Obviously military officials need to do a better job of monitoring such Islamist radicals within the ranks but that scrutiny should be applied equally to the foreign-born and the native-born; it should not stop this highly successful program of immigrant recruiting.
In fact the program needs to be expanded to recruit a much higher number of personnel and not only for the Army but for all the services—and by civilian agencies such as the CIA, State Department, and USAID as well. Only in this way can we address the pervasive, crippling lack of knowledge of foreign languages and cultures within our government, which constitutes a major strategic liability. As an army recruiting official told the Times: “We send people to language school, but it is tough to get a non-native speaker to the level of these folks.”
“In Iraq, McClellan added, Bush saw “his opportunity to create a legacy of greatness,” something McClellan said Bush has said he believes is only available to wartime presidents.
The president’s real motivation for the war, he said, was to transform the Middle East to ensure an enduring peace in the region. But the White House effort to sell the war as necessary due to the stated threat posed by Saddam Hussein was needed because “Bush and his advisers knew that the American people would almost certainly not support a war launched primarily for the ambitions purpose of transforming the Middle East,” McClellan wrote.
“Rather than open this Pandora’s Box, the administration chose a different path — not employing out-and-out deception, but shading the truth,” he wrote of the effort to convince the world that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, an effort he said used “innuendo and implication” and “intentional ignoring of intelligence to the contrary.”
“President Bush managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option,” McClellan concluded, noting, “The lack of candor underlying the campaign for war would severely undermine the president’s entire second term in office.”
IMPEACH
This sad sack was typical of the incompetents Bush surrounded himself with, from “Brownie” of Kitrina fame to the blundering fools who didn’t foresee what would happen after Saddam’s overthrow. First-rate men hire first-raters. Second-rate men hired third-raters. This seems to sum up Bush and his administration.
Banjo is absolutely correct. Further, I want to disbelieve McClellan, but based upon the ineptness of this adminstration, I’m inclined to say that much what he says is probably close to the truth.
You just can’t trust the goyim with important jobs. We long for the good old days with Ari.
- The Commentary/AIPAC Crowd
It will be interesting to see if he can speak on behalf of his book any better than he did on behalf of the President.
“But throwing around the word “propaganda” is the type of thing people do to sell books and get splashy coverage from the media.”
Of course. McClellan couldn’t possibly believe all the hysterical BDS lies he’s spouting. He simply knows that editors give book deals to Bush bashing twits, and he’s bitter because he was forced to “quit” his job as Press Secretary. Who would pay him to write a book favorable to Bush? With his record?
Nobody.
Wexler wants to bring McClellan before, the House Judiciary Committee to testify under oath regarding the devastating revelations made in his new book. This, of course, is complete nonsense if the ‘devastating revelations’ were of such consequence that McClellan, along with the rest of the Administration took,
McClellan is admitting he acted(for how long?) no differently than Gobbels as Minister for Public Enlightenment & Propaganda and should be charged accordingly. If McClellan is found guilty the rest of the Admin can be charged accordingly.
Surely McClellan, in his capacity, accumulated piles and piles of evidence to back his claims.
/Boy I’m sick of this nonsense and especially those that are mentally challenged who will cite and cling-to this garbage as gospel…err…secularism/multiculturalism…whatever.
My son was told in his high school government class that propaganda and information are the same. Another example of dimishing the meaning of words.
Why limit the time span? McClellan was not “probably the worst White House press secretary in recent memory,” but the worst ever, and there are no probabilities about it. As one who has researched and published about American history from the Civil War to the mid Twentieth Century I feel confident about this assessment. Why Bush and company kept McClellan around was always a mystery to me. The only answer that makes any sense was that the administration had utter contempt for the White House press corps — richly deserved, I might add — and believed that McClellan and the press deserved one another.
That’s rich that the WH thought McClellan and the press deserved one another. hoprfully the vaulted Congressional investigator will have to back up his threat with action and put Scotty under oath…we could finally get to the facts about Valarie Plame’s treason!
“He didn’t voice any reservations at the time, while cashing his paycheck and defending the President to the media pack everyday. Was he lying then? Or is this some kind of recovered memory?”
And you call McClellan a naif?
jjvomit,
not a single one of the manufactured Bush scandals manufactured over the last 7 years has turned out to be even remotely factual. When will you pathological BDS cases ever learn?
no one here has yet said they disagree with him that bush lied about the reasons for war