Of Chickenhawks and Cowards There have been people flinging about the term "chickenhawk" as if it were a telling blow against hypocrisy. The thinking goes that those who call for war are being inconsistent if they don't actually take up a rifle and serve. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We have an all volunteer military. There is no draft. That means that every single person in the American armed forces chose to take a job in which the job description includes the possibility of killing people or being killed. To simplify things: soldiers get paid for making this choice in peacetime, and they earn their paychecks in wartime. Do police officers get to take breaks when crimes happen? Do firemen get to slack off when fire breaks out? Of course not. When the situation calls for it, these men do the jobs that they're paid to do, despite the fact that it puts them in harm's way. Society reimburses them for it, and they chose to do the job. Soldiers are no different - if the country decides to go to war, they will fight because it's their job . Another point: the people fond of the "chickenhawk" epithet are generally those innocent of the benefits of specialization. They would like nothing better than a society in which the wealthy are forced to do manual labor in the name of "equality". The fact is that the military can't function without people who aren't carrying rifles. As just one example, military researchers like myself provide those lovely thermobaric bombs. Is it "hypocritical" for me to design these weapons rather than fire them in battle? It's ridiculous to contemplate a "non-hypocritical" society that supports war, as by the "chickenhawk" definition everyone who supported war would have to be carrying a rifle. As Pejman calculates, that's about 160 million people in the US right now. So, lefties: think it through before you call someone a chickenhawk. Because if they all decide that they are being hypocritical, you just might end up with 160 million new NRA members. An open letter to Tapped: From a reader comes this open letter to The American Prospect's weblog: ====== I find this little statement of "obvious fact" rather ill considered: "The only people hot to fight this war are a bunch of nerdy chickenhawks brandishing grandiose plans to remake the Middle East." It has the overwhelming aspect of being, from the get-go, utterly untrue. I could introduce TAPPED to a number of New Yorkers of all ages, sexes, and classes who's only problem with the war is that it is not killing enough of the right people quickly enough. And that's just New York. You start wandering around in what passes for the heartland and the incidence of American flags starts to go up as well as the bumper stickers and other visible forms of opinion proliferate. Perhaps TAPPED means the count of people in favor of the war is low within the circles in which they lunch and dine. From my own experience, this is not an unusual reality filter in the Boston/Cambridge environment. They really need to get out more. After all, they are actually taking Dowd seriously. Ah well, as TAPPED has failed to learn from the Book of Eastwood: "A man's got to know his limitations." I also wonder if TAPPED is aware of the gay slur implicit in the use of "chickenhawks." Given his limitations in the realms of popular culture he probably doesn't know that a "chickenhawk" is an older homosexual who makes a point of hitting on young boys. Perhaps some chickenhawks are "nerdy" and perhaps others are not. And while you could probably find some career chicken hawks who are solidly anti-war, it doesn't seem to me that they make up a large enough demographic to matter. Then again, perhaps TAPPED counts these sorts of people the same way that he counts traffic -- just count, rinse, repeat until you get a number big enough to like. Or perhaps TAPPED, being an uncounted number of individuals, could just talk to and count itself until it reaches critical mass.