Iraq, Numbers and Black People

A reader who chooses to remain nameless sent me a link to this post at Tom Dispatch.com looking at Iraq by the numbers. I can’t really excerpt any bit of it … its worth reading in its entirety.

And via Avedon Carol, a story at Brilliant at Breakfast about why recruitment is down among African Americans:

“In 2000, “Jackson reported, “23.5 percent of Army recruits were African-American. By 2005, the percentage dropped to 13.9 percent. National Public Radio this week quoted a Pentagon statistic that said African-American propensity to join the military had dropped to 9 percent.”

I think the phrasing of that quote is a bit off, but the conclusion is obvious: you simply cannot trust black people to do what is right. This dates back at least to the War of Yankee Aggression, where black people refused to stand up for States Rights like real (i.e., Southern and white) Americans even to defend their own status as three-fifths of a human being with none of the rights, which was really the only Right the States really cared about. And now, on aggregate their behavior is equally shameful. Given that most black people are poorer than average, it is their duty to put themselves in danger in a war whose rationale keeps shifting if only to ensure that the College Republicans can stay here and “fight the war of ideas” (which from what I can tell means to convince the rest of us we should be out fighting in Iraq because a bunch of illiterates in Pakistan think they can make the world into caliphate or something).