Ret. Colonel on Iraq: ‘We can’t do this with a volunteer army’
The following article was published on March 13, 2007 in the Rebel Yell.
Silence fell over a Wright Hall lecture on Friday as Col. Richard L. Klass informed the audience that the United States would reinstate the draft.
It took a few seconds before the retired Air Force officer admitted that he was joking, but his point was serious nonetheless.
“If we’re going to stay in Iraq for 10 to 15 years, we can’t do it with an all- volunteer army,” he said.
In the lecture, sponsored by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation – a non-profit group based in Washington D.C., Klass said the conflict in Iraq could have implications in the United States and abroad.
According to Klass, the recent surge has only coincided with a decrease in violence because ethnic cleansing is already complete.
Before the war, Klass said, the city of Baghdad was 70 percent Sunni. Now, with the violence that has broken out during the occupation, the population is 70 percent Shia, he explained.
Furthermore, the conflict has mostly benefited al-Qaeda by providing them with recruits, training and money, and Iran by removing Saddam Hussein, its biggest rival.
Things don’t look good on the home front either. Not a dime of the money spent on the war has been paid for as most of the money has been borrowed from China, he noted.
Funding for the war has been approved by Congress up until February of next year, meaning that the next president will have 10 days from the start of his or her term to submit to Congress for more money.
Coupled with the deficit, Klass predicts this to be a Republican Party trap for an incoming Democrat to assure that he or she only serves one term.
Nobel laureate Dr. Catherine Thomasson also took the podium to shift the focus to Iran and its ongoing troubles with the U.S. over its nuclear policies.
“If I had to live in a Middle Eastern country I’d choose Iran,” she said. “Health care is a constitutional right, there is equal access to university education, free contraception and mandatory family planning, women can divorce their husbands, and 80 percent of Iranians have access to the Internet.”
In 2002, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, a world intergovernmental agency set up to monitor nuclear technology, caught the Iranian government enriching its own uranium.
After enforcing stricter protocol, the IAEA inspectors concluded that there was no trace of a weapons program in the country. Sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies conducted investigations into the matter and concluded the same thing, stressing that there are no good military options.
According to Thomasson, The Bush administration has made a grave mistake by cutting diplomatic relations with Iran. Apart from negotiating, the only options are sanctions or an invasion – neither of which would have good outcomes.
“Diplomacy is the only thing that is really going to work,” she said. “It’s suicide for our country to invade.”
She concluded her presentation by urging the listeners to write and call their Congressmen and women to encourage them to sign the Iran Diplomatic Accountability Act of 2008, which seeks to normalize relations with Iran and resume negotiations.
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