Back to writing

Well, having been ill these 9 months, and slow on writing, I must apologize for not posting.

Herre is a post about some things concerning the war in Iraq, something to think about when we see our young people dying daily for the right to kill muslims... oh, sorry, I meant dying defending the US and Democracy (how could I forget?

It is easy to describe this war as racist because of the enemy. But it ironic that it is being fought by a predominately white US Military, and that the casualties are disproportionately among white people.

The young men and women being brutalized in Iraq, bleeding and dying and learning to hate, are the results of what we used to call the poverty draft. The poverty draft results, as the name suggests, from the lack of options for lower class young people. Poverty in this country is racist, disproportionately affecting people of color, and the Active Duty Military has more Black and Hispanic people, and fewer white people, than the general population of the US. But the US Military Reserves and National Guard are disproportionately represented by lower middle class and rural white people. And with the small size of the active armed forces, the National Guard and Reserves are doing most of the fighting.

The truly ironic result of this situation is that for the first time in a US war since the 1950s, white people are being wounded, and are dying, in numbers greater than they represent in the national population. (64% of the US Population is white, 71% of the Iraq casualties are white). See Brian Gifford, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, University of California, Berkeley: "Combat Casualties and Race: What can we learn from the 2003-2004 Iraq Conflict?"