The occupation of Iraq, besides taking the lives of 3, 511 American soldiers, besides taking the lives of Iraqi civilians, besides costing American taxpayers like you and like me $436 billion and climbing by $200 million each day, the occupation of Iraq might be boosting crime here. Read for yourself:
The prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have put pressure on the National Guard, whose citizen-soldiers can be called away from civilian jobs for months or years at a time to fight beside regular soldiers in war zones.
About 16 percent of the 182,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are members of the National Guard.
But here’s where we get to the smaller bite out of crime:
Communities across America have been especially hard-hit by the deployment of some 24,000 police officers since September 11, 2001. Police officers make up 5.1 percent of the National Guard and military reserve.
Repeated deployments to war zones do more than mess with police schedules — the loss of just one officer can devastate a small town, where police forces are shoestring operations and the jobs of the town’s “first responders” often overlap.
Because so many of our brave boys and girls in blue are fighting unnecessarily in Iraq, police departments do less patrols and less community outreach. And because, “by law, employers must leave a Guard member’s job open while the worker is deployed,” police departments are struggling to fill slots temporarily. Why? Because the kinds of folks who become cops are also the kind of folks who join the military, and because training and recruitment take time, money, and people, and many of those people are, go figure, in Iraq.
So what can we do? We’re going to bring your attention to the Wednesday we wrote a while back called “Memorial Day, Everyday,” which includes five ways we can help bring a peaceful and successful end to the occupation of Iraq, convince others this can truly happen, and help our returning soldiers in the process.
