Sign of a declining empire
It's coming to pass. President Bush's expansion of the military may well come about by offering speedier citizenship to immigrants who agree to join the military, reports the Boston Globe.
In other words, mercenaries.
Army officials, who asked not to be identified, said personnel officials are working with Congress and other parts of the government to test the feasibility of going beyond US borders to recruit soldiers and Marines.
Seriously, how else can you maintain a world-improving military without reinstating the draft?
This idea was first mooted a couple of years ago by neocon nutball Max Boot. And one of his fellow Trotskyites enthuses about how it kills two birds with one stone, although he doesn't quite put it that way:
"It works as a military idea and it works in the context of American immigration," said Thomas Donnelly , a military scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington and a leading proponent of recruiting more foreigners to serve in the military.
Liberal hawk Michael O'Hanlon from Brookings thinks it's a swell idea, too. (I guess this is the new notion of balance in my profession of journalism — get people from both ends of the ideological spectrum to endorse the same imperial design.) Anyone who objects is doing so sotto voce:
Some within the Army privately express concern that a big push to recruit noncitizens would smack of "the decline of the American empire," as one Army official who asked not to be identified put it.
Clearly that's not someone who's on board the world-improving bus. Doesn't he know that imperial leaders create their own reality now?
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