US attacked over green card soldiers

Abu-Alwafa · Joined: 05 Aug 2007 Posts: 23

In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.

US attacked over green card soldiers

By James Gooder

Monday 01 September 2003, 0:45 Makka Time, 21:45 GMT

Nearly 40,000 of America's frontline soldiers are not US citizens.

Many of the troops on duty in Iraq do not count English as their first
language and would prefer to take orders in their native tongue ... usually
Spanish.

The revelation has prompted British MP George Galloway, one of the fiercest
critics of the invasion of Iraq, to accuse the US of using its "green card"
troops as cannon fodder.

Galloway went on to attack the US policy of putting its poor minorities and
non-citizens in the frontline of its foreign wars.

In an exclusive interview he told Aljazeera.net that it was part of a long
US tradition of using its underclass as cannon fodder.

The statistics, buried by White House spin doctors, reveal that a
significant minority of troops fighting under the US banner are not in fact
US citizens but residents hoping to speed up their citizenship.

Galloway said that this was typical of a government used to having the
marginalised fight its battles.

"Nothing has changed since that last failed attempt to invade and determine
the future of another country, Vietnam," he told Aljazeera.net from his
holiday villa in Portugal.

"The proportion of blacks in the army was 40%, while in the US population
the number of blacks was a quarter of that," he said

"Of course the underclass has now become increasingly more Hispanic than
black."

Disproportionate casualties

This explains why a disproportionate number of the so-called US casualties
in the invasion and occupation of Iraq have borne Latino names.

Galloway says that on a weekly Atlanta radio show in which he participates,
the callers have repeatedly claimed that Blacks and Hispanics are the fodder
army recruiters are after.

The Pentagon says that there are 37,401 non-US citizens on active duty, and
that joining up has a special incentive for them - an American passport.

"The military services have processes and programmes in place to help
service members expedite their citizenship," says a US Department of Defence
spokesperson.

"The estimated time for the application is about six months."

Citizenship has been especially hard to come by due to the draconian
immigration rules imposed by the US Department of Homeland Security since
the 11 September 2001 attacks.

It can take several years to gain citizenship, for those lucky enough to get
it. Signing up to the army can speed this up, provided the GI comes home
alive.

Promises

Other incentives under the Montgomery GI Bill include the promises of a
college fund of up to $50,000, post service employment and training.

But activist Carlos Mendes of the Latinos Against the War in Iraq coalition
says that many soldiers have told him that these promises often fail to
materialise.

The US military relies on volunteers, the Pentagon argues, and there is no
official draft, therefore no pressure on anyone to sign up.

Yet in a country where further education is prohibitively expensive, and
medical care privatised, these incentives deliberately target America's poor
minorities, as well as those desperate for citizenship, freeing the sons and
daughters of those with money and influence from service

"The people who made the decisions never sent their sons to get hot, bloody
and dirty on the battlefield," he said.

Even when there was a draft, the decision-makers stayed out of trouble. "The
white sons of the rulers of America, including a certain George W Bush, have
always found ways around the draft, in his case through his bogus service in
the air auxiliary, while Dick Cheney took one course after another at
university," he said.

Outspoken critic

Galloway, the Glasgow Kelvin MP who has consistently criticised US and
British policy on Iraq, famously called Bush and Blair "wolves" over their
war-like rhetoric leading up to the invasion.

He opposed UN sanctions imposed after the last Gulf War complaining that
they inflicted huge suffering on ordinary Iraqis.

Mr Galloway has visited Iraq on numerous occasions and met the country's
former president and major figures in the Baathist government.

But he was also a vigorous campaigner during the Thatcher years, picketing
the Iraqi embassy in London, when the Conservative government supplied arms
to Saddam Hussein.

http://english.aljazeera.net/

Archived from group: aus>education

BernardZ · Joined: 05 Aug 2007 Posts: 4

In article , almared_alarabi@yahoo.com
says...
> The revelation has prompted British MP George Galloway, one of the fiercest
> critics of the invasion of Iraq, to accuse the US of using its "green card"
> troops as cannon fodder.

You must think we are a bunch of idiots in this forum to quote a person
like George Galloway here.

xml=/news/2003/04/22/ngall22.xml>

The guy was in bed with the Iraqis.

The Enlightenment · Joined: 05 Aug 2007 Posts: 2

"Abu-Alwafa" wrote in message news:...
> In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
>
> US attacked over green card soldiers
>
> By James Gooder
>
> Monday 01 September 2003, 0:45 Makka Time, 21:45 GMT
>
> Nearly 40,000 of America's frontline soldiers are not US citizens.
>
>
> Many of the troops on duty in Iraq do not count English as their first
> language and would prefer to take orders in their native tongue ... usually
> Spanish.
>
> The revelation has prompted British MP George Galloway, one of the fiercest
> critics of the invasion of Iraq, to accuse the US of using its "green card"
> troops as cannon fodder.
>

The reality is that white troops take a sligly higher proportionate
number of casualties than so called minorities.

There is no basis to the disingenious propaganda that mestizo
hispanics or blacks are used as cannon fodder.

Galloway has NO basis for any of the dross he said. I have provided
links and statistics to prove him a liar.

The reality is that whites predominate in the sharp end as combat
troops, especaily as special forces. Young white guys join up for an
adventure and to do some duty than leave for a career outside the
military. "Minorities" tend to look on the Army as a carear and work
in logistics.

**************************************
"If anybody should be complaining
about battlefield deaths, it is poor rural
whites," says Prof. Charles Moskos, a
military sociologist at Northwestern
University.

Defense Disputes Racial Imparity,
Washington Times, Jan. 14, 2003. Dave
Moniz and Tom Squitieri, Front-Line
Troops Disproportionately White, Not
Black, USA Today, Jan. 21, 2003.]

*************************

Fighting Whities

In early January, black congressmen
Charles Rangel (D-NY) and John
Conyers (D-MI) introduced a bill to reinstate
the draft, claiming the all-volunteer
force does not have enough whites.
Mr. Rangel says non-whites will bear the
burden of a war with Iraq, as he says
blacks did in Vietnam.

Reps. Rangel and Conyers are wrong.
A report by the Office of the Undersecretary
of Defense for Personnel and
Readiness says that while it is true blacks
are overrepresented in the military (21
percent of enlisted ranks vs. 12 percent
of the overall population), most are concentrated
in administration and support.
Blacks fill 36 percent of these positions,
but only 15 percent of ground combat
arms: infantry, armor and artillery. Only
10.6 percent of infantrymen are black.
Blacks are especially rare in the elite
units that see the most fighting. Only 4.5
percent of Green Berets are black, and
just 2.5 percent of Navy and two percent
of Air Force pilots are black.

"If anybody should be complaining
about battlefield deaths, it is poor rural
whites," says Prof. Charles Moskos, a
military sociologist at Northwestern
University.During the 1991 Gulf War,
whites accounted for 71 percent of the
550,000 soldiers deployed, and 76 percent
of deaths. Blacks were 23 percent
of US forces but only 17 percent of the
dead. Hispanics accounted for four percent
of the force and four percent of the
deaths.

Despite myths to the contrary, blacks
did not shoulder a disproportionate burden
in Vietnam. According to the VFW,
88.4 percent of the men who served in
Vietnam were white, and they suffered
86.8 percent of combat deaths. Blacks
accounted for 12.1 percent of deaths, a
figure almost exactly the same as their
percentage of the population. [Bill Gertz,
Defense Disputes Racial Imparity,
Washington Times, Jan. 14, 2003. Dave
Moniz and Tom Squitieri, Front-Line
Troops Disproportionately White, Not
Black, USA Today, Jan. 21, 2003.]

The black and white
military populations are
more similar to each other
than the civilian populations,
which may help explain
claims for successful
racial integration. The
military gets richer-thanaverage
blacks and poorerthan-
average whites. The
average white recruit
comes from a household
that earns $33,400 a year,
which is 25 percent less
than the white average of
$44,400. Black soldiers come from
households with incomes above the
black average: $32,000 vs. $27,900.
Black soldiers are also more likely than
black civilians to come from two-parent
families.

In the military, racial gaps in education
levels and mental abilities are considerably
narrower than in the country
as a whole. Ninety-nine percent of blacks
are high school graduates, as are 97 percent
of the whites. In the national population,
61 percent of whites and 14 percent
of blacks score above the 50th percentile
on the armed forces mental aptitude
test. In the military, the figures are
83 percent and 59 percent, which means
blacks in uniform are considerably more
capable than civilian blacks. [Steve
Sailer, The Real Story About Minorities
in the Military, UPI, Jan. 17, 2003.]

Race Relations: The Myth Of The Military Model
By Steve Sailer

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/army_and_race.htm
(worth going to this link as it is heavily corrslinked to primary
sources of data)

The racial situation in the military was thrust back into the news
recently when Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Harlem) proposed reinstating the
draft. The Korean War veteran offered a good argument and a bad one.
[Bring Back the Draft; New York Times Op-Ed, Dec 31,
2002, by Charles B. Rangel.]

Rangels good argument: when members of today's political elite
contemplate sending America's all-volunteer forces into harm's way,
they are in little danger of personally losing family members. Among
the children of the 535 members of Congress are found only a handful
of officers and a single enlisted man.

It wasn't always like this. Sons of President Theodore Roosevelt died
in both WWI and WWII. Teddy Roosevelt Jr. won the Medal of Honor
landing in the first wave at Normandy at the age of 56.

Rangel's bad argument: "A disproportionate number of the poor and
members of minority groups make up the enlisted ranks of the
military"

This just isn't true. While blacks are heavily represented in
the military in general, they make up only 15 percent of the combat
ranks - just barely above their share of younger Americans.

Moreover, they are fairly rare in exclusive jobs such as pilots and
Special Forces. As I noted in my movie review of Black Hawk Down, the
remarkably authentic film of the ill-fated 1993 raid in Somalia, of
the 40 American soldiers depicted (all of them Rangers or ultra-elite
Delta Force commandos), only one was black.

If all goes according to plan, these carefully selected warriors would
do most of the fighting. Of course, wars don't always go according to
plan;

Combat units have gotten whiter because a lot of young white guys join
up to "play Rambo" for four years and then go to college using
military tuition benefits. In contrast, more blacks view the military
as a long-term career.

If you intend to stay in until you are 40 or 50, it makes a lot of
sense to pursue a specialty that offers plenty of desk jobs. Crawling
on your belly and sleeping in the mud might sound like fun if you
aren't staying past your early 20s, but it gets old awfully fast as
you yourself get older.

The military, especially the Army, is famous for how well blacks and
whites get along. The high level of black accomplishment, with its
accompanying equality and amity, is often held up as a model for the
rest of society.

Much of what the Army does is well worth studying, as I pointed out in
my 1995 article "Where the Races Relate," which explained to
university administrations what they could copy from the Army to
improve race relations on campus. (Amazingly, they didn't listen.) The
fine 1997 book All That We Can Be: Black Leadership and Racial
Integration the Army Way by sociologists Charles C. Moskos and John
Sibley Butler gives a detailed view.

It would be wonderful if racial gaps could be made to disappear with
just a little discipline. But the Army has a secret weapon: it
carefully selects which applicants it accepts. Black and white
recruits are quite equal even before they join up.

Even in the 1970s when the quality of white recruits was low,
respectable black families were proud to send their children into the
Army. Back then, according to Moskos and Sibley, 90 percent of black
enlistees were high school graduates, compared to only 40 percent of
whites.

After President Reagan raised soldiers' pay and helped make patriotism
fashionable again, the capabilities of white enlistees rose sharply.
Now, virtually all recruits have high school diplomas.

White and black enlistees come from families with similar incomes. A
1999 Defense Department study found that among American households as
a whole, the average income for whites was $44,400 and for blacks
$27,900. Among enlistees, however, the racial gap was almost
non-existent. White recruits came from households averaging $33,500
per year versus $32,000 for blacks - i.e. a figure well above the
black national average.

Perhaps most importantly, the Army is a heavy user of aptitude tests.
A surprisingly high fraction of young Americans are ineligible to join
the Army because of lack of intelligence; extrapolating from
Moskos and Sibley's figures, about a fifth of all whites and
three-fifths of all blacks wouldn't make the cut.

The brain power of those accepted is impressive. Moskos and Sibley
found that in 1994

"83 percent of white recruits scored in the upper half of the mental
aptitude test (compared with 61 percent of white youths in the
national population), while 59 percent of black recruits scored in the
upper half (compared with 14 percent of the black youths nationwide)."

In other words, the Army's black enlisted personnel score just as well
on the general aptitude test as the average white American.
(African-American officers average even better, of course.)

There are still differences, so whites tend to predominate in the most
intellectually-challenging military jobs. Still, by drawing just from
blacks with relatively high IQs, the Army has managed to sidestep a
huge number of problems.

So the magic race relations bullet that the military has found turns
out to be - IQ tests.

And keeping out the lower-scorers.

This will be hard to apply in America at large.