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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 12/10/09

Fresh Afghanistan Warriors the President Needs

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This president has inherited a chessboard God himself would find challenging. He faces so many challenges that little time remains to build visionary, long tern solutions. On top of gargantuan problems, the poker player must work with a 20th century mindset and vocabulary that the previous administration further dumbed-down.

Nonetheless, for the sake of your loved ones and the world the President must soon move to build a new army of hometown Yanks with a West Point esprit de corps that hikes into the world and works to make it a better place.

The Vision Thing

John Kennedy had what this time needs. He sent Special Forces to Vietnam, astronauts to the Moon, and Peace Corps Volunteer into earthly frontiers.


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At that time, Special Forces were largely ignored. Kennedy was visionary enough to see them as the future of warfare. How we trained those early Green Berets represented how we had to begin preparing for future warfare. If in 2000 we had a man of Kennedy's vision in charge, Special Forces would have fought and quickly ended the 911 induced war in Afghanistan.

In a world filled with needs, Kennedy had the vision to see that the people from the world's then undisputed economic and military power had to be involved in the world, if it were going to understand and help it prosper. So, Kennedy gave birth to the Peace Corps. His vision had it quickly growing to a million. Thirty-eight years later, less than 180,000 Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) have completed two years of service and, consequently, we and the world have greatly suffered militarily and economically.

Imagine how much richer, healthier, and smarter America, Vietnam, and the world would have been if we:

- Had sent only Special Forces rather than 500,000 soldiers to Vietnam?
- Had supported our Special Forces at Tora Bora in December 2001 and ended Al Queda then?
- Were now in our eighth year of turning Afghanistan poppy fields into fields of pomegranates?

And what about Kennedy's other visionary army that was to wage war on peaceful battlefields? Imagine how much richer America and the world would be had millions of PCVs served by now, as Kennedy envisioned.

Imagine if:

- The last PCVs had not stopped serving in Pakistan in 1967, Afghanistan 1979, Libya 1969, and Iran in 1976.
- Out of the Middle Eastern nations of...Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, --- more than only Jordan was exposed to the simple, basic, grassroots work of American PCVs.

In the 1960's only two nations had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that threatened about 3 billion people, many of whom were poor and suffering. Today, many nations have weapons of mass destruction that threaten about 7 billion people, of whom well over 2 billion are poor and suffering.

When the President mentioned the need for a "civilian surge to serving West Point's Cadets, he could have added, "We need more like you serving in civilian corps that do good, win hearts, and erase crazy "isms from men's minds. Today, we need to do more than just revive JFK's lost vision of a robust Peace Corps. We need to bolster the armies of those public and non-profits who do such needed service in the world.

21st Century Army of Peaceful Warriors

Over the decades, our military has been forced to evolve from knowing only how to blow-up to learning how to build up nations. Unfortunately, in that slow learning process, America shed too much blood and too many dollars before policy makers realized that body counts didn't reveal wars' winners.

Now, our military is trying to train 20 year-olds in the nuances of killing nondescript enemies, nation building, and speaking in tongues. It's a needed step; one Special Forces are often trained to do. However, in today's world it's not nearly enough.

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Dwayne served in the Peace Corps in the slums of Mumbai, India, worked several Habitat Projects, and was on the start-up team of the California Conservation Corps. He has a Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University, has been a builder, teacher, (more...)
 

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