Entry strategy, not Iraqi exit strategy, is the problem


By Dwayne Hunn

In Washington D.C, a dead soldier’s grieving mom is searching for a White House fence on which to chain herself.

On the Left Coast, Congresswoman Woolsey screams for an Iraq Exit Strategy. (Exit Strategy? Honor Our Troops - Bring Them Home, October 21, 2005, San Francisco Chronicle.)

We are marching back to the grief, angst, and demonstrations of Vietnam, whose indelible lesson seems to have been erased.

Our problem is not an Exit Strategy.

Add a couple months to a simple order from the Commander in Chief, and our generals will bring our troops home to loved ones.

Our problem is our Entrance Strategy.

This administration spends inordinate time and energy on spinning. Congressional parties jab and stab each other over political inanities. In the mean time, the nation yearns for laws and leadership that implements a practical vision that saves future generations from needing bloody Exit Strategies.

Beware America. After about 2,000 years, Rome’s leaders got soft and lazy, bathed themselves in pursuit of more and more money, lost touch with its empire and little people, and soon found little tribes and battles eroding its power.

While Nero fiddled…

While Bush chops wood and Congress trades barbs, People's Lobby Inc. offers visionary Congressional proposals that can stop destroying today’s 200+ year old Roman Empire from burning itself quickly into an historical junk heap.

To toughed up America’s character, re-establish good relations in the global village, and end wasteful, illogical battles that drain our blood and resources, we need to send a peaceful, productive legions of peaceful American centurions into the world. Here’s how People's Lobby citizen-initiated World Service Corps proposed congressional legislation would do that.

If enacted this year, each year for the next six years approximately 130,000 Americans would voluntarily choose to serve in their choice of the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, Habitat for Humanity, Head Start, Doctors Without Borders, or the Red Cross, International Rescue Committee, OxFam, Mercy Corps, State Conservation Corps, etc. By the seventh year one million American World Service Corps members, or .6th of 1% of those aged 20-60, would be annually serving at home or abroad for at least the ensuing 20 years.

Why would a million Americans continue serving each year? Because:

1) Americans like playing on good teams. They yearn to serve in today’s trying times. They like challenges, especially challenges that call on them to help others.
2) When offered modest financial incentives that build their lives and their nation’s character and skill set, Americans, especially those in the low and middle classes, march into serve.

What modest financial incentives would the World Service Corps proposals offer the millions of Americans who would serve?

Upon completion of service, they would receive two years of community plus two years of state college tuition, equivalent educational loan pay-off, or equivalent investment in Medical or IRA Accounts, which would be transferable to family relatives.

That approximately $15,000 investment, one-sixth of the military recruitment incentives presently offered, would multiply itself many times over in American assets and brains. For many, it would add coveted degrees to the practical education serving in the WSC’s classroom of the world bestowed upon them. And it would not overwhelm our future with amputees and traumatically stressed soldiers.

Based on an inane fear of a trumped-up Commie Domino Theory, we spent $111+ billion dollars sending 2,582,304 soldiers to Vietnam, where over 58,000 died. Had enough Americans working abroad experienced the economic plight of those commie nations that were going “to bury” us, we would have scoffed at the Domino Fear and have used our human and financial resources differently.

For the estimated $43,000 it cost to send each of our soldiers, many of whom remain homeless and lost on our streets today; we could have sent 13,875,000 Peace Corps Volunteers into the world.

How much better would the world be, how much smarter would our policies be, if we had followed that approach years ago. Imagine the practical, cost effective policy insights our nation and administration would follow if filled with 13.9 million Returned Peace Corps Volunteers today.

A policy of productive service isn’t a fantasy. The policy can exist tomorrow, if today’s declining superpower would only present visionary, practical programs that can-do Americans will willingly implement at home and abroad.

When you enter the schoolyard as a pal, you make more lasting friendships than when you enter as the know-it-all or bully. Over time, those relationships make your schoolyard and adult life easier and richer.

Our Entrance Strategy into the world caused us to have a bloody costly exist strategy from Vietnam. Decades later, we are bitterly suffering through another Exit Strategy.

For today’s 2,000+ or yesteryear’s 58,000+ grieving mothers, we need to change our Entrance Strategy.

With the proposed World Service Corps congressional legislation, we could have a policy that insures fewer grieving mothers will chain themselves to lost loved young ones tomorrow. You can help make that happen by helping at http://www.worldservicecorps.us.