Voting

Friday, December 17, 2004

AFP Recruitment "Reporting"

In a great show of biased journalism, the AFP reports that the "US Feels Impact of Iraq War as Recruitment Slips." The story starts out with the fact that the National Guard fell 7,000 persons short of their 2004 goal for recruitment, which puts their strength at 10,000 less than hoped for. The next line in the story:



"The declines suggest that the Iraq war is beginning to have a long-feared impact on a part of the force that the army in particular has drawn on heavily for both support and combat troops."

So, we are led to believe that the military is no longer able to recruit soldiers. Americans no longer have any desire to fight in the Iraq war. In short, it's another Vietnam. Well, what does the military have to say about why the numbers are falling short?



"'We have the active duty army that is growing by 30,000. So obviously we're looking at the same pool of people.'" "Another factor is stop-loss orders '...soldiers who normally or typically come off of active duty into the guard... are not doing that in as a big a number.'"



In other words, the active duty has increased 30,000, but the National Guard is down 10,000, so that means that Americans no longer support the Iraq war? Huh? Looks like a net increase of 20,000. The real story here is that most of the men and women want to actually serve as active duty, rather than National Guard. The AFP is being very dishonest by slanting the story with their headline and first paragraph.

No comments:

Post a Comment