Hidden Agenda: A National Draft in the Future?

Legislation has been proposed in the House and Senate (twin bills S89 and HR163) to reinstate the draft as early as June 15, 2005, to apply to both men and women ages 18 to 26 and college deferments will NOT be allowed.

$28 million dollars has been added to the 2004 Selective Service System and the Pentagon has quietly begun a public campaign to fill all 10,350 draft board positions and the 11,070 appeals boards slots nationwide. It appears that both John Kerry and the Bush administration support this action, but you can have an impact by putting pressure on them and by contacting your members of Congress.

Click here to email Senator Chuck "I vote with the junta" Grassley.

Click here to email your Congressman.

More information on the draft is available at Common Dreams.

Don't Reinstate the Draft

On the eve of Mother's Day, a holiday with its origins rooted in the peace movement, it's hard to believe that chatter to reinstate the draft appears to be gaining momentum by the day.

A return to the draft is not the answer to our problems in Iraq.

Click here to take action!

In times of great national purpose, such as World War II, an all-inclusive draft (with exceptions for conscientious objectors) is the right way to share fairly the burden of a rapidly expanding military. However, the current war with Iraq is not such a time.

Today, the Bush administration presides over an increasingly unpopular war that has strained to the breaking point our military's capacity. Rather than admit to a failed invasion of Iraq, the administration's approach (resorting to extremely aggressive corporate outsourcing of jobs and aggressive call ups of both the National Guard and Reserve) is busting the budget and is unsustainable.

While the Bush administration publicly opposes reinstatement of the draft, the Selective Service System has quietly begun planning in case it is needed, and growing numbers in Congress are calling on the President to begin to prepare the public for the need. With an election a few months away, it is hardly surprising that an administration that won't even include the real cost of the occupation of Iraq in its proposed budget is unwilling to discuss renewing the draft.

Urge your representatives in Congress to face honestly the human and budgetary costs of our occupation of Iraq but also let them know that you oppose reinstituting the draft. A far better alternative for relieving the strain on our military would be to create a strong strategic plan to leave Iraq and to bring in military forces from other countries.

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Jennifer Willis
Director
ActForChange.com

Changing Hearts and Minds

Had the article on The Nation's website been written by anyone but William Greider, I'd have ignored it. But the most prescient progressive reporter of the last couple of decades I read. And one paragraph, about why today's mass media have simply refused to second-guess their shameful acceptance of Georgedick Bushcheney's war on Iraq, stood out, both for its profundity and for its aha! factor:

"How could such forgetfulness prevail, especially among a smart, engaged group like news people? It is perhaps not as sinister as it sounds. Most of the men and women now in charge of the news processes were boys and girls during Vietnam. The youngest reporters were not yet born. Their generation, I imagine, experienced the war more distantly as a disturbed era that ended in national humiliation. An air of shame hung over their growing-up years, a residue of bitterness and guilt all around. Did Americans wimp out? Did the news media poison their patriotism? My hunch is that many of today's reporters and editors came to think so and were determined to be less squeamish, more 'manly' about warmaking. Editors over 50 can't hide behind this excuse."

Maybe. Maybe it's just that today's young people simply aren't afraid of dying for something so meaningless, as my contemporaries were, and how 58,000 of them did.

Too many of us are sanguine in the knowledge that the only Americans who are dying in Iraq today are volunteers. Many doubtless joined up believing they were defending their country, or saw the military as a good career. But others surely enlisted because they hadn't a notion of what they wanted to do after graduating high school. Still others signed up for the National Guard and reserves thinking they'd be fighting forest fires or floods in their home states, not shipping out for an endless tour overseas.

But the common denominator is they understood there was a possibility that one day Uncle Sam, like the Godfather, would call on them to perform a service. That day, which many thought would never come, came.

The rest of us, not having to worry about being drafted - at least not yet - can sit back, sympathize, utter words of support for the troops, and a silent prayer that our rear ends aren't in danger.

A draft would change that mighty quick and, indeed, a few progressive legislators such as Congressman Charles Rangel of Michigan have even proposed conscription with no loopholes as a means of provoking opposition to the war. I don't think we're ready for a step like that, and besides, giving a draft to Georgedick Bushcheney would be like giving Osama a key to the Redstone Arsenal.

But no matter how the war goes, and whether a Democrat retakes the White House or not, we're not going to get the kind of antiwar sentiment in this country William Greider writes about. Not unless our young people can truly be made to feel that their lives are about to be cut short for something they can neither believe in nor understand.

Contact Ira Lacher here.

Regarding The Draft

Ira's essay brings up an important issue: The Draft. Legislation has been proposed in the House and Senate (twin bills S89 and HR163) to reinstate the draft as early as June 15, 2005, to apply to both men and women ages 18 to 26 and college deferments will NOT be allowed.

$28 million dollars has been added to the 2004 Selective Service System and the Pentagon has quietly begun a public campaign to fill all 10,350 draft board positions and the 11,070 appeals boards slots nationwide. It appears that both John Kerry and the Bush administration support this action, but you can have an impact by putting pressure on them and by contacting your members of Congress.  More information is available at Common Dreams.

Linda