Immigration and the National Guard

I've read Charlie Reese's columns for as long as I've had an interest in news...basically, my entire adult life. His latest two, however, are probably among his finest:

Regarding the deployment of National Guard to the border:

Young men and women join the National Guard willing to serve their country in an emergency. Our leaky borders are not an emergency. They've been leaking for the past decade. For six years, Bush has ignored this problem. The only emergency is the collapse of Bush's popularity and the Republican Party's fear that it might lose control of Congress this fall. When guardsmen are called to active duty, they have to leave their civilian jobs as well as their families. This almost always involves a pay cut and causes financial hardship for the families. It also disrupts the civilian employers' operations. Everybody is willing to endure all of this when the need is real. In this case, however, there is no need at all to use the National Guard.
If you were a Marine, where would you rather be: in the American Southwest, or sitting on Guam, a lump of coral in the Pacific where brown tree snakes and insects far outnumber the human population? The problem is that the military-industrial complex doesn't want to give up its empire.

Regarding the ability of leaders to "sell" their people on a war:

Millions of men have gone to war because, as Americans or British or French or Germans or Russians or Japanese, they believed it was their duty. The danger lies in the fact that unscrupulous men, through misrepresentation and propaganda, can motivate people to go to war even though it is not in their country's interest, much less their own. Unless there is an invader threatening one's home and hearth, it is never in the interest of an individual to go war – unless he decides to be a mercenary.

It is an evil paradox that men with the lowest motives can launch wars by appealing to the highest ideals of better men.

It's interesting that we can deploy 100,000 troops to a country 5,000 miles away, but have difficulty sparing 6,000 to secure our own 'home and hearth.'