Author: mopress

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.”

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

http://www.geocities.com/draft_in_2005/main.htm

http://www.comdsd.org/

Why the Peace Churches are Meeting in March

By Greg Moses

Z-Net / CounterPunch / Sam Hamod’s Today’s Alternative News /

Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, a Democrat and West Point grad, has an interesting theory about Iraq. Call it the Korea thesis.

“Consider South Korea,” said Reed in early December. “We have been there since the early 50’s. It was not until the 80’s that we began to see an irreversible commitment to the democratic process to complement an aggressive market economy.”

“If we are unwilling or unable to “stay the course” in Iraq,” continues Reed, “a premature departure by the United States or an ejection by a frustrated Iraqi government will lead to civil conflict and an explicit or implicit partition of the country that will force adjacent countries to exert their influence over events in Iraq. This situation will create a ‘Lebanon on steroids’ in the apt words of Tom Friedman.”

Reed’s Korea thesis of Iraq is fascinating to think about as we ponder the meaning of an upcoming assessment of the occupation to be undertaken by retired Army General Gary E. Luck. It’s not that I don’t believe the New York Times when they dwell on Luck’s character as a gentleman and a scholar. But I’m stuck on the General’s well-known experience as commander of the Korean theater.

Luck became a kind of underdog hero among Congressional hawks when his request for more missiles in Korea was ignored on Capitol Hill. In a 1995 letter to Georgia’s Democrat Senator Sam Nunn, Luck argued tersely for a missile system in Korea that would be “highly flexible, extremely mobile, capable of 360 degree coverage and able to counter the full threat spectrum.”

http://www.fas.org/spp/starwars/offdocs/abm062l1.htm

As luck would have it, before he was sent to Korea, the general in 1990 was the newly minted commander of the XVIII Airborne Corps, shortly before they were dropped into Saudi Arabia as first boots down to Gulf War One, says Odessa.com.

In a terse timeline, Odessa reminds us how Daddy Bush planned that First Iraq Invasion in consultation with Texas oil buddies James Baker and Rob Mosbacher; Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney; Joint Chiefs Chair Colin Powell; and Texas-buddy-to-be Robert Gates, who now oversees the Bush campus otherwise known as Texas A&M University in College Station. (Rumsfeld at the time was just entering his service at General Instruments, the real name of a company which according to his official biography was a “leader in broadband transmission, distribution, and access control technologies.”) But the point of this guest list is simply to remind us that Luck has been point guard for a whole team of coaches who have not retired from the game.

http://www.odssa.com/chrono.htm

So these are the questions: Is it likely that the same general who once ordered Airborne into Saudi, and who lectured Sam Nunn how to be a hawk, is going to come back from Iraq and say, aw shucks fellas, no way we can handle Iraq. Or will he more likely, based on past performance, return with a hard-core plan to secure Iraq for as many decades as it takes to get, in the words of Sen. Reed, “an irreversible commitment to the democratic process to complement an aggressive market economy.” As one of my students petulantly informed me, one does not place question marks after rhetorical questions.

Which brings us to the strange visit reported by the Brethren Service Center of New Windsor, MD this past October eighth. One Cassandra Costley (yes, like General Instruments, that is her real name) Director of the Alternative Service Division at Selective Service stopped in, “because I happened to be in the neighborhood.” But come to think of it, now that she was there, she did want to know if the famed peace church was geared up to handle the demands of alternative service for conscientious objectors just in case a draft were, you know, kinda needed hypothetically at some undetermined date in the possibly near future, although clearly the White House had said nothing to her personally that such a thing might be in the works, etc.

This chance meeting led to other meetings, because peace churches have been watching war states closely for about four hundred years, and on March 4 the peace churches of America will convene near Chicago to get their alternative service act worked out. One would have to wonder if they are not meeting a week too soon, seven weeks from today, after General Luck has returned with his professional assessment about what needs to be done in Iraq.

http://www.brethren.org/genbd/newsline/2004/dec3104.htm#2

And let’s not forget the timely Democratic Senator from Rhode Island, Jack Reed, who was quoted this week by Baltimore Sun reporter Tim Bowman, one of the reporters who found themselves in possession of a leaked memo from another general about the exhausted Army Reserves.

“By consistently underestimating the number of troops necessary for the successful occupation of Iraq, the administration has placed a tremendous burden on the Army Reserve and created this crisis,” said the very same West Point, Airborne, and Harvard man who thinks Iraq looks a lot like Korea to him.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/01/06/MNG2VALREE1.DTL

So it looks to me, kids, like it’s time to get real about the draft. Either you can get your conscientious objector papers together and sign up with the peace churches, or you can prepare for employment in the newly restructured Army Reserves, which is going to be rotating folks into Korea, I mean Iraq, for the rest of your lives. They say it’s a free country you live in, boys, so they might even give you another whole month to decide.

http://www.bluffton.edu/~mastg/pacifism.htm

Let me conclude by sharing with you my sense of the road ahead in Iraq . There are several possible outcomes. Iraq could emerge as a stable and responsible regional power with a political system that exhibits democratic characteristics and an economy that is more tolerant of private enterprise. This will not happen unless we are committed to a long term and expensive presence in Iraq . Consider South Korea . We have been there since the early 50’s. It was not until the 80’s that we began to see an irreversible commitment to the democratic process to complement an aggressive market economy.

If we are unwilling or unable to “stay the course” in Iraq, a premature departure by the United States or an ejection by a frustrated Iraqi government will lead to civil conflict and a explicit or implicit partition of the country that will force adjacent countries to exert their influence over events in Iraq. This situation will create a “ Lebanon on steroids” in the apt words of Tom Friedman.

http://www.senate.gov/~reed/speeches/SalveSpeechDecember62004.htm

2) Council endorses Selective Service conversations, alternative service consultation.

http://www.brethren.org/genbd/newsline/2004/dec3104.htm#2

The Annual Conference Council has given its endorsement to continued conversations between the General Board and Selective Service in a telephone conference call Dec. 10. The endorsement was given in response to the invitation by Selective Service for the Church of the Brethren, as a historic peace church, to develop a plan for alternative service opportunities. The council also endorsed Church of the Brethren participation in an Anabaptist meeting on alternative service opportunities.

Earl K. Ziegler, chair of the council, called the group together to discuss the matter at the request of Stan Noffsinger, general secretary of the General Board. Noffsinger turned to the council in its capacity as executive committee of the Conference, reported Conference secretary Fred Swartz. Noffsinger told the council that he considered the opportunity and call to be larger than a General Board program, and an invitation to the entire denomination to be involved in a positive witness to its heritage and faith.

“The council understood from the background material given that Selective Service, or the Bush administration, have no plans in the offing to institute a new draft,” Swartz reported. “There have been discussions during the past two presidential administrations of the eventual possibility of some kind of general national service. Selective Service officials explained to General Board staff that they want alternative service opportunities to be in place if and when such a program would be launched.”

The council unanimously agreed to “give the general secretary our encouragement to maximize our efforts to have alternative service opportunities in place” and “to continue to explore the relationship with Selective Service.” The council added a strong urging for all Annual Conference agencies “to renew the task of resourcing the church with tools to guide our youth in their choice of nonviolent service.” Noffsinger reported that he will give On Earth Peace a full report of the conversations with Selective Service and will make sure that agency is a participant in the discussion. “We don’t want to miss the part of providing resources to our youth that will help them understand and embrace the Brethren peace witness,” commented Chris Bowman, moderator of the 2004 Conference.

Noffsinger and Jim Hardenbrook, 2005 Annual Conference moderator, also reported to the council their participation in a recent meeting of executives and moderators of Anabaptist communions. Although this fellowship has met annually, the Church of the Brethren has not been involved for six years. The meeting also included officers of the Mennonite Church US, the Brethren in Christ, the Conservative Mennonite Church, Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) US, and the Mennonite Brethren USA.

At the Anabaptist meeting, the MCC’s executive director Rolando Santiago brought a proposal urging Anabaptist churches to intensify their witness to service. After Church of the Brethren representatives disclosed the contacts with Selective Service, the group made plans for a consultation of representatives of Anabaptist communions to discuss the tradition’s understanding of service and how to prepare for alternative service opportunities. At Noffsinger’s invitation the consultation will be held at the Church of the Brethren General Offices in Elgin, Ill.

After hearing the report, the Annual Conference Council took action to support “our denomination’s participation in a consultation on alternative service March 4-6, 2005, to be held in Elgin, Ill., as proposed by the council of moderators and secretaries of the Anabaptist churches, and in which the Annual Conference moderator and General Board general secretary will participate on behalf of the Church of the Brethren.” Council members participating in the meeting were Ziegler, Bowman, Hardenbrook, Swartz, Ron Beachley, Joan Daggett, and Lerry Fogle.