Another BuzzFlash special value book, $5.00 below retail price and that includes shipping and handling.

On the homefront, unless you have a family member in the military, the Iraq War is a distant, almost abstract conflict. That's the way the Busheviks want it.

In fact, privatized military personnel may equal the number of GIs in Iraq. War has become corporatized. If Iraq were really a threat to our national security, we would all be putting our lives on the line, not lining up for an I-Phone.

The extended Bush and Cheney families are model examples of sending others to fight a war without putting the lives of any relatives on the line.

How to resolve this class delegation of war to the poor, rural, minorities, and those seeking citizenship?

Good question, and this book provides some suggestions.

Whether we join the military or not, don't we all owe some form of service to our nation -- whether in Vista, the Peace Corps, social service or the armed forces?

Right now, we have a structural injustice in terms of waging war. We basically delegate the job to those who are not part of the upper classes or elite power structure. Bush and Cheney send off "expendable" Americans and immigrants seeking citizenship, while doing phony public relations photo-ops praising them as they use these Americans as cannon fodder.

Publishers Weekly:

In this impassioned, convincing manifesto, Schaffer (Keeping Faith) and Roth-Douquet, a former Clinton White House and Department of Defense staffer, call for class integration of the military. Their arguments are personal: Roth-Douquet is a military wife and Schaffer's son is a marine, and the authors fall within the demographic they critique.

Alternately narrating, they relate their experiences with the military and detail the liabilities of the present all-volunteer "corporate" force: the hindered policy-making ability of a civilian leadership without significant ties to the military, the weakening of the armed forces themselves, and "the sense of lost community and the threat to democracy that results when a society accepts a situation that is inherently unfair." While Schaffer proposes a lottery draft and Roth-Douquet suggests the military "convince" people to sign up, they both call for all young people to submit to some form of national civilian service. Though the authors occasionally exaggerate ("we are fast approaching the day when no one in Congress and no president will have served or have any children serving"), they make a clarion call in the face of increasingly controversial foreign policy and a military stretched thin.