Details here:
"It is fair to ask how many wars our imperial nation can fight with its hard-pressed volunteer forces, many of whom are now forbidden to leave when their enlistments run out. Or, when they are finally released, how many will re-enlist. The National Guard, for example, failed to meet this year's quota of 58,000, recruiting 5,000 less people. A more pressing question is, how many Americans will be forced to fight, perhaps die for the crazed imperial dreams concocted by a small clique of extremely influential and well-funded neoconservatives, virtually none of whom ever bothered to serve in the military they so profess to love?....
"And even more ominously: There is increasing chatter in Washington among neoconservatives and their pet columnists of ever more wars ahead. They call it spreading their version of democracy; I call it aggressive and unjustifiable wars. Israel, America's client state, is now hinting at an attack on Iran while neocons here are suggesting that America's next target should be Iran. Unanswered is what happens if Iran strikes back at Israel and U.S. forces in Iraq? In fact, the issue of Iran is now being discussed behind closed doors at the White House. How many dissenters do you think are present at these sessions?
"This time Selective Service System (SSS) regulations have been changed. This time, as SSS states, 'a college student could have his induction postponed only until the end of the current semester. A senior could be postponed until the end of the full academic year.' Canada will no longer welcome anti-draft people. A new SSS plan, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer last May, proposes raising the age of draft registration to 34 years old, up from 25, and possibly including women as well. People with special skills, such as computers, foreign languages, medical training and the like, will also be subject to being drafted. In effect, if approved, it will be a universal draft where everyone, including the kids of the rich and powerful, will allegedly be eligible to serve in the military.
"But remember this: No congressional son was drafted during the Vietnam War and today there are virtually no congressional sons or daughters serving as enlisted combat personnel in Iraq. Since 9/11, it is almost impossible to name a single prominent pro-Iraq war activist, those who demand an all-out war against terrorism, whose son or daughter has enlisted for active military duty....
"Many pro-draft politicians are doubtless waiting for the post-election period when a 'safe' effort will be made to reintroduce conscription under the guise of fighting terrorism."
======================
If I may add a thought, for the benefit of naifs: remember how the country was whipped in to a war frenzy over Iraq? No one in the summer of 2001 would have dreamed that it would be a matter of national urgency within 18 months to attack a decimated country, whom we outspent on military might 400 to 1, and half of whose population were children. (No one would have dreamed it on September 12, 2001, except for the madmen in the Bush Administration.) But it happened, with media collusion and cowardice, and on the basis of lies and falsehoods peddled by our "leaders." A draft will be sold the same way, and it will have to be sold, because there is no way that Bush & co. can maintain their current belligerent posture towards the world without more bodies. No one doubts that the military professionals prefer volunteer armies; but they do not set policy in Washington, and as things stand, they are hardly listened to when it comes to policy that involves them (such as troop levels in Iraq). While there is no assurance that Kerry--whose increasingly hawkish pronouncements are getting harder and harder to distinguish from Bush's--will change course, the odds are surely better. And unless the course is changed, the writing is on the wall for the next generation of victims.
(A sidenote on naifs: this one--a law review student, it appears, named Anthony Rickey at Columbia--purports to take issue with this posting of mine, yet neither disputes nor responds to any of the factual claims in that posting, instead quoting something else, which he denounces as silly, before noting, parenthetically, that I had not quoted it! This can not be a quality of argumentation that makes my friends on the Columbia Law School faculty proud. Another one, alas, for the annals of the decidedly weird. [By the way, on the basis of this robust argumentation, he thinks that I and, by implication, you dear readers are "schmucks." Goodness!)
Recent Comments