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The feared Republican Guard. The backbone of the regime. Fanatics. They survived the last war intact because they were withdrawn from the battlefield while other units, packed with ordinary draftees, were decimated. The Republican Guard was allowed to survive, and that's how we found ourselves in the mess we're in today. If only we'd confronted the Republican Guard then, forced them into combat, we wouldn't be faced with the problem we have today: a mad, disastrous military campaign that is sure to ruin not only Iraq, but ultimately, the entire Middle East and with it America.

	George W. Bush, Jr
Position:	President of the United States
Draft-Dodging Strategy:	used family to join Texas National Guard , a draft-dodging tactic favored by "sons of the powerful" (Colin Powell/Memoirs). GWB went AWOL when National Guard introduced drug testing, remained AWOL for 17 months- SEVENTEEN MONTHS -- in 1972-3. He was not disciplined for this in any way.
Connections:	Dad; Harken; Saudi Royal Family
Military Unit:	Aggies Pep Squad

The war-like Republican Guard is the bane of the United States Armed Forces. No, not the Iraqi Republican Guard. They're harmless by comparison. Soldiers and officers who know the horror of war and plan accordingly. At least they have a context.

We're talking about America's Republican Guard. A powerful group of proactive-war-mongering Republicans and their pundits marked by two common features: abjectly draft-dodging the Vietnam War, then when the coast was clear, slipping out of hiding, joining the Republican far-right and relentlessly shoving a newer generation into battle in order to test the theories they developed while in hiding during the 60s. All are bound together by the first commander-in-chief to finally turn their crazed war plans into America's reality. That commander, George W. Bush, is in many ways the fiercest, most commanding Republican Guardsman of all.

	Richard Perle
Position:	Ex-Chairman of Defense Policy Board
Draft-Dodging Strategy:	permanent neo-con grad student at U of Chicago
Connections:	Global Crossing, Bush clan/CIA
Military Unit:	IDF

In May, 1969, just twelve days before Bush's student deferment was due to expire, Bush was accepted into the Texas Air National Guard unit for a six year stint. This in spite of his low score on the pilot's aptitude test (25, the lowest score allowed), and in spite of the waiting list that some kids spent years on. Like a true Republican Guard, Bush deployed his assets, as in family assets, to help push him past the massive months-long waiting list and get him sworn in immediately. His martial charisma was so great that Bush's commander, Col. Walter B. "Buck" Staudt, staged a special ceremony so that he could have Bush sworn in as an airman the day he applied.

He also cloaked his forces well. Bush was supposed to switch guard units to Alabama in 1972 to allow him to work on a n Alabama Republican senatorial campaign, but the base commander in Mobile has no recollection of Bush ever reporting. For 17 months Bush was nowhere to be found. In 2000, angry Alabama veterans offered a $3,500 reward to anyone who could prove that Bush had served in the state. There were no takers. Bush's vanishing act was a masterstroke of Republican Guard deception, and it came just in the nick of time: the same year Bush went AWOL, the Air National Guard started instituting drug tests. Bush that year was suspended from flight duty for not taking his annual physical - the very physical that included the drug testing.

While other, lesser war veterans might have suffered devastating losses by skipping 17 months of duty - decorated war veteran Senator Daniel Inouye commented on Bush's maneuvers, "At the least, I would have been court-martialed. At the most, I would have been placed in prison."

	Bill O'Reilly
Position:	Fox News
Draft-Dodging Strategy:	avoided military service during Vietnam era by unknown strategy.
Connections:	unknown
Military Unit:	Ministry of Disinformation

	Dick Cheney
Position:	Vice President of the United States
Draft-Dodging Strategy:	Started with student deferment; when rules tightened, married to get family deferment. When rules changed to exempt only married men with children, Cheney went to work, fathering a child born exactly nine months and two days after the rule-change.
Comment:	"[I] had other priorities in the 1960s than military service."
Connections:	Halliburton, Nixon, Satan
Military Unit:	Legions of Beelzebub

Bush the commander could not have chosen a more fearsome, compatible deputy to handle day-to-day, the vision thing, and all that. We're talking of course about Dick Cheney. You wouldn't know it by his grandpa-pedophile looks, but Cheney actually was born at exactly the right time to serve his country in the Vietnam War. But the wily Republican Guard commander outflanked the US draft board. During the Vietnam War, he received five student and marriage deferments of service, and when the marriage deferment was lifted, Cheney sought a parent deferment, and his wife gave birth to their first child - the infamous lesbian Mary - nine months and five days after the marriage deferment was lifted.

	Tom DeLay
Position:	Republican Congressman (Texas)
Draft-Dodging Strategy:	Vital strategic work as pest exterminator
Comment:	"I would have joined up but those minorities took all the places"
Connections:	petro-oligarchs, Bush clan
Military Unit:	Verminators

Perhaps it was his sensitivity earned through years of Republican Guard experience that inspired Cheney to issue a serious of increasingly rose-tinted predictions on how the war in Iraq would go. In September 2002 he said, "I don't think it would be that tough a fight; that is, I don't think there's any question that we would prevail." In a speech in August, he cited a scholar's view that "the streets in Basra and Baghdad are sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans."

Cheney's brilliantly orchestrated psyops plan worked not only for morale on the home front, but battered the enemy abroad. On March 16th's Face The Nation, he said the fight would last "weeks rather than months. There's always the possibility of complications that you can't anticipate, but I have great confidence in our troops." Cheney also predicted the fight would "go relatively quickly, but we can't count on that."

It was then he predicted that the regular Iraqi soldiers would not "put up such a struggle," and that even "significant elements of the Republican Guard. . . are likely to step aside." It was hard to discern if Cheney was speaking about himself and the other Republican Guards, or the name given to elite Iraqi forces defending Baghdad. Asked if Americans are prepared for a "long, costly and bloody battle," Cheney replied: "Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way. . . . The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that."

If you think commander Cheney's battle experience and foresight are downright chilling in their accuracy, then baby, you ain't seen nuthin' yet. Consider the man next on the Republican Guard's chain of command, Richard Perle. Last summer Perle claimed that Hussein is "much weaker than we think he is." Calling the regime a "house of cards," Perle said "support for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder." Perle should know: during Nam, his will collapsed at the first whiff of student deferment expiration at his infamous Seige of the Perpetual Grad Student. The man speaks from experience, and it's that same experience, as well as sensitivity to what it's like to fight, kill and die in battle, that led Perle to state in an interview on PBS that said

	Newt Gingich
Position:	ex-Speaker, House of Representatives
Draft-Dodging Strategy:	NG used the Cheney method to avoid serving in Vietnam: first a student deferment, then marriage deferment when rules for student deferment were tightened
Other distinctions:	Visited dying wife in cancer ward to tell her he was getting a divorce
Connections:	neo-Confederates, Christian right
Quotation:	"Just wait till we get to Baghdad and Saddam uses those WMDs! What'll the French say then?" (NG laughs happily)
Military Unit:	Tenure or Death' Fedayeen (SW Atlanta Campus)

In August last year, an exasperated Republican senator Chuck Hagel, a war veteran himself, said: "Maybe Mr Perle would like to be in the first wave of those who go into Baghdad." What the hell does Hagel think Perle is, a goddamn grunt?! He's a Republican Guard officer, for chrissakes! Perle faces much rougher conditions, such as delayed flights and pesky investigative journalists. Those grunts in Iraq and Vietnam got it easy compared to the hassles Perle has faced as a Republican Guard draft-dodger!

When the battlefield changed after the first week of the war, few were surprised to see the flexible war tactics that made Perle feared and famous employed. In a CBC interview, he said, "There is some resistance, of course. I don't know anyone who thought this would be a war without resistance."

Perle was one of the inventors, along with Cheney, of the perpetual student deferment feint. He graduated USC in 1964,

	Frank Gaffney
Position:	Head, Center for Security Policy
Draft-Dodging Strategy:	avoided service in Vietnam era by unknown strategy
Connections:	Perle, Iran-Conta Alums
Quotation:	"Just wait till we get to Baghdad and Saddam uses those WMDs! What'll the French say then?" (NG laughs happily)
Military Unit:	TIPS

	Rush Limbaugh
Position:	Talk-radio host
Draft-Dodging Strategy:	alleged medical problem which RL has identified as either "anal cysts" or "an ingrown hair follicle on my bottom." Also eligible for exemption under Vietnam-era draft law on sexual orientation.
Connections:	I had student deferments in college
(RL, 1992):	and, upon taking a physical, was discovered to have a physical -- uh, by virtue of what the military says, I didn't even know it existed -- a physical deferment and then the lottery system came along, when they chose your lot by birthdate, and mine was high. And I did not want to go -- just as Governor Clinton didn't."
Military Unit:	Rear Guard

One of Perle's main proteges, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, followed a similarbattle plan, a second prong to Perle's.

	John Ashcroft
Position:	Attorney General of the United States
Draft-Dodging Strategy:	to avoid serving in Vietnam, Ashcroft sought and received a military deferment because, he claimed, he was involved in work of national importance: teaching business education at a small college in his native Missouri.
Comments:	Ashcroft is the purest distillation of all that is loathsome in American culture since J. Edgar Hoover slithered back to his crypt
Connections:	neo-Confederate underground, Civil War Reenactment Society, Evil in all its many forms
Military Unit:	Lord's Resistance Army

You might accuse him of suffering from undue optimism, but then we'd tell you, yeah, right, you only say that cuz you're not a Republican Guard commander! Whattaya you know, pal!

At a speech Wolfowitz gave in Philadelphia last November 11th, Veteran's Day, the Republican Guard veteran predicted, "I believe, particularly once [the Iraqis] see that the end of [Hussein's] regime is in sight, that huge numbers, including large numbers within their own military will say, 'We're not going to be the ones who die for Saddam Hussein,'" he concluded. Clausewitz would be awed.

How did Wolfowitz gain such brilliant insight? Through a baptism of deferrals, that's how. Like Perle, Wolfowitz came of draft age right around the Gulf of Tonkin Act, but managed to cloak and feint his way around the recruitment offices' many thrusts by obtaining a string of deferrals, in large part thanks to his grad student stint at the University of Chicago, one of the top Republican Guard training camps. There he studied with Richard Perle, and from there, both of the war-mongering neo-cons safely waited until they were out safely of the draft

	Doug Feith
Position:	Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy
Draft-Dodging Strategy:	Turned 18 the year draft ended
Connections:	Likud
Military Unit:	Stern Gang

Wolfowitz has been obsessed with pushing the war against Iraq. In 1998 he was part of a neo-con push to prod Clinton into the Iraq quagmire. Though he failed, Wolfowitz prepared his thrust for another, more opportune day. Specifically, September 12, 2001. The day after America lost 3,000 people to terror attacks led by Saudi fundamentalists.

	David Wurmser
Position:	State Dept Special Assistant
Draft-Dodging Strategy:	unknown
Connections:	Perle, Likud
Military Unit:	Proxies

	Lewis "Scooter" Libby
Position:	Cheney's Chief of Staff and NatSec Advisor
Draft-Dodging Strategy:	Student Deferments (Yale)
Connections:	Perle, Neocon Academics
Military Unit:	Skull and Bones

Wolfowitz's boss, Donald Rumsfeld, is treated with some suspicion by Republican Guardsmen because he didn't avoid the draft, having flown jets between the Korean and Vietnam Wars. However, Guardsmen caution that Rumsfeld is "fully on board" with their plan both to push the war on Iraq, they admire the fact that he never actually saw combat duty, and point to his recent tactics as proof that "he's one of us." Namely, Rumsfeld screwed with the generals' battle plans, left them exposed, and and shifted blame to Commander Tommy Franks for having devised the plan when the strategy fell apart. "It's his plan," Rumsfeld said at a news conference.

The list of Republican Guard commanders and their brilliant moves goes on and on. Tom Delay, who spent Vietnam working as a pest exterminator in Texas; Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich, who both took the Cheney battle plan, using student deferments, marriage deferment, and then the 9-month-and-one-week baby deferment (referring to a classic flanking deferment move whereby the Republican Guard commander, on learning that his Vietnam War marriage deferment was running out, immediately impregnates his wife in order to receive the still-valid child deferment, with such speed as to suggest frantic and sometimes violent sex).

RepGuard Colonel Lott deserves particular attention here: A March 10, 1997 Time magazine article stated, "The Vietnam War was heating up, but Lott, like other students, enjoyed an exemption until his graduation from law school in 1967. By then he had married Tricia Thompson of Pascagoula and, according to Selective Service records, secured a 'hardship' exemption because of

	Karl Rove
Position:	Conspirator, Dirty-Tricks specialist
Draft-Dodging Strategy:	student deferments
Connections:	Bush Sr, low-ranking DIA and CIA
Military Unit:	Dirty Dozen

	Paul Wolfowitz
Position:	Deputy Secretary of Defense
Draft-Dodging Strategy:	Permanent neo-con grad student at U. Chicago
Connections:	Likud, Neocon academics, Pentagon
Military Unit:	Georgetown Jihadii

Other major administration hawks -- such as Elliott Abrams on the National Security Council staff and Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Strategy John Bolton -- also avoided military service during the height of the Vietnam War, due to elusive medical problems which vanished once that unhealthy draft ceased.

Even more remarkable, the major agitators for war outside the administration also lack direct military experience. Of the 32 prominent signers of a now-famous September 20 letter last year from the Project for the New America Century (online at www.newamericancentury.org ) to Bush urging him to include Iraq, as well as Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and the Palestinian Authority as targets in the war on terrorism, only three have ever stepped into military uniform. However - and this is the key - 29 of the signatories are proud ranking members of the Republican Guard.

Take for example one of their most successful rear guard Republicans, Rush Limbaugh, who pulled off a now famous withdrawal from Nam that ranks up there with Dunkirk as a feat of brilliant retreat tactics.

	Kenneth "Kakewalker" Adelman
Position:	Defense Policy Board
Draft-Avoiding Strategy:	no military service, strategy unknown
Quotation #1 (pre-war):	"I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk."
Quotation #2 (this week):	"I think that the phrase `cakewalk' (this week): was too glib. It was too easy and not applicable to a kind of wartime situation."
Connections:	Rumsfeld yes-man
Military Unit:	Martyrs of Hyperbole

	Trent Lott
Position:	Disgraced Racist
Draft-Dodging Strategy:	"The Vietnam War was heating up, but Lott, like other students, enjoyed an exemption until his graduation from law school in 1967. By then he had married Tricia Thompson of Pascagoula and, according to Selective Service records, secured a 'hardship' exemption because of the impending birth of their first child Chet...Vietnam, like civil rights, was another uncomfortable subject to be ducked." -- Time magazine, March 10, 1997
Connections:	White Citizens' Councils
Military Unit:	Chickamauga Reenactment Regiment

	Michael Ledeen
Position:	Utility Conspirator
Connections:	CIA
Military Unit:	al-Heebie-Jeebiyah

Here is how the populist quartermaster Limbaugh described his deferment: "I had student deferments in college and, upon taking a physical, was discovered to have a physical -- uh, by virtue of what the military says, I didn't even know it existed -- a physical deferment and then the lottery system came along, when they chose your lot by birthdate, and mine was high. And I did not want to go -- just as Governor Clinton didn't."

At least Limbaugh left a record behind (though he still hasn't come clean about his other record behind, if you know what we mean-that's right, Limbaugh's been covering the rear for the Republican Guard willingly, eagerly, and with zest for decades now). Fox News's firebrand Bill O'Reilly has managed to expunge all records of his whereabouts during Vietnam from the public record. All we know is that he wasn't there.

Let's face it, "shock and awe" is the best way to describe the effect of the Republican Guard strategy on the world. Shock your opponents by your incredibly hypocritical behavior, then awe the commander-in-chief, Republican Guard General George W. Bush, with plans that appear so big and bold, they might actually work. Then sit back, roll up your sleeves, and prepare to lie, bribe, or malinger when the shit hits the fan. Cuz that's what Republican Guards do best.

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