BCT Editorial – 4/10/05

This page was last updated on April 14, 2005.

Summer soldiers; Editorial; Beaver County Times; April 10, 2005.

Below is a detailed critique of the subject editorial.

“Our all-volunteer Army failed to hit its recruiting goal in March, its second consecutive month of shortfall. And not by a little, but by almost one-third.

“The news won’t be getting better. The Associated Press reported Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey has said that internal forecasts indicated the Army was likely to miss its monthly recruiting goals in March and April.

“The Army Reserve did even worse in March than the regular Army. It recruited barely half of the soldiers it wanted. It has not met a monthly goal since December.

“We’ve come a long way from the chest thumping, flag waving and cheering that accompanied the invasion of Iraq. It’s painful to admit, but we are showing ourselves to be a nation of summer soldiers and sunshine patriots who shrink from the service of our country while letting others die and be maimed in our stead.

“That’s what happens when jingoism replaces patriotism.”

[RWC] I’m ashamed I used to be a paperboy for this so-called newspaper.

Did you notice the editorial provided no supporting evidence for its conclusion? The author apparently made no effort to learn the true causes of the alleged lower recruiting figures. Because an editorial is an opinion piece, however, the author is under no obligation to present a cogent analysis.

For the sake of argument, let’s go out on a limb and assume the editorial accurately reported facts in the first three paragraphs. I have an alternative explanation for lower recruiting. For more than two years all we’ve heard from the Times and its fellow travelers in the so-called news media is how misguided, wrong, immoral, futile, Vietnam-like et cetera the Iraq War was/is. Perhaps the persistence shown by the old media in running down the effort is finally having its desired effect.