Hi, Greg,
Thanks for tackling this story. I don’t know, though … I also read the report that you cite about the SS woman “stopping by” the Brethren Service Center and it worried me a lot, but there is also Rick Jahnkow, someone I would say is a national expert in counter-recruitment and draft issues with Project YANO in San Diego who has been telling us for the last three years that hype about a draft tends to sidestep the more immediate injustices of the poverty draft. That is, he feels a draft is very unlikely because of the huge resistance it would almost certainly encounter, but stepping up recruiting in the high schools and elsewhere – through such means as the video games you describe – are the ways the military will get the people they need. And this is what we are seeing and hearing from students, teachers and counselors when we are in the schools.
Also, I do have a concern about the last paragraph where you urge kids to “sign up with the peace churches”. I realize you are being partly sarcastic here, but one of the messages our Nonmilitary Options group tries to stress when we talk to students about conscientious objection is that they don’t have to belong to ANY church, or espouse any religious belief in order to object to participation in war. As you probably know, case law in the early ’70’s provided for “moral or ethical beliefs” to be grounds for CO status as well as “religious beliefs”. I think it’s really important that this be as well known as possible. We are always encountering people who still
think you “have to be a Quaker”, or some such in order to be a CO.
You may be right, and maybe a draft really is around the corner. But, so far it seems that the poverty draft dovetails so closely with the depressed economy that the vicious cycle of war spending & resulting decreased funding for jobs programs, college grants, etc. continues to draw plenty of young people into the military….
Susan Van Haitsma
Nonmilitary Options for Youth
http://www.progressiveaustin.org/nmofy
Author Replies: The last paragraph of the “Getting Real†story refers to the choice that would be posed if and when the draft were re-instated. At that point young folks who gain CO status would be shuttled into alternative service. Peace churches are the only folks I know actually planning to provide such service, but others may well be on the way, and I look forward to writing them up. Sorry if my story suggested that in order to be a CO, one must first belong to a peace church.
As for the theoretical challenges that my article poses to existing accounts of draft possibilities, Alex Jones is another voice who says we already have a draft if you consider the coercive policy changes that are keeping soldiers in combat longer than would be normally expected. If we add this to Rick Jahnkow’s thesis about a “poverty draft,†then we arrive at a point where we ask not if there will be draft, but what kind of draft will it be? And this is the point from which we have already seen folks such as Charlie Rangel, the Congressman from New York, supporting a lottery method as more fair than the economic and policy coercions now in place. Add up the staunch Republicans, the Jack Reed Democrats, and the Rangel alliance, and there you have it. Can this alliance sell America on a lottery?
“The draft would be political suicide,†writes another reader, “but if Bush got away with a war on the wrong country, I don’t doubt the American people aren’t so dumb they wouldn’t buy a draft.â€
And this suggests one more reason why a draft would have some benefit to the political climate in the USA. As they say, the gallows concentrate the mind. Since we now have a clearly belligerent infrastructure, it might not be a bad idea if voters indeed began to think more carefully about the consequences of war policies carried out in the collective name. In a draft lottery, Ann Coulter’s kill, kill, kill might confront its organic antidote. Had a lottery draft been in place two years ago, would Americans have supported the Iraq invasion? In its distribution of risk, a lottery draft may very well distribute some much-needed sobriety among the people who ultimately vote these policies up or down.
Will it be an irony of history that neo-con strategists, building upon an ideological base of rugged individualism, pursued policies of state so aggressive that the situation caused by those policies made it necessary to legislate a re-socialization of American life that had been so deliberately dismantled since Reagan? Compulsory National Service. Or may we say that their aggressive warmaking brought them to the point where they needed to invoke the one war policy most likely to increase resistance to warmaking among the people? The Draft.
Philosophical questions: does an all-volunteer military under structural conditions in the USA today lend itself to becoming what Reserve Commander Helmly says it is on the verge of becoming? The moral equivalent of a mercenary force? Has the USA military in other words become most simply a corporation in which those who make war for money hire soldiers who make money for war? As the people look down from coliseum seats waiting for their master of ceremonies Ann Coulter to plunge he thumb down, we ask: Is the socialization of military service under these conditions a method for restoring to the spectacle some moral vocabulary that cannot be driven by pure Fox news bloodlust, greed, and ignorance? Or will the draft simply enable more death with even less purpose?
I remember Sartre: we choose our dead.
Here’s a Spring ‘04 story from the National Catholic Reporter about pro-draft progressives:
http://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/washington/wnb041404.htm
And a few addresses to draft watchers:
http://www.peacehost.net/EPI-Calc/Draft.htm
MoPress 