I believe that there will be a draft and instead of fighting it, I am going to fight to make sure Bush voters and other Neocons get drafted. This means no exemptions for college, anal cysts, or being an only son of a farmer, or marriage or any other stupid things. No I won't allow a National Guard or National Service exemption either. They can serve in those instututions for a couple of years after their two years in the real military. I don't want any Champaign units for guys like Bush. Bush supported Viet Nam and he should have fought in it. I am not sympathetic to Libertarian arguments of the draft being involuntary servitude.
I believe that what is happening to the people of Iraq is involuntary servitude and if Bush voters aren't made to fight it they will just use the bodies of the Iraqis as entertainment, because they get a kick out of blowing up stuff. I think that such decadent thinking owes itself a draft. They voted for Bush so they get what's coming.
BTW, I also think people who conscientiously object and end up in jail or end up going to Canada are in no way unpatriotic, but I also believe that unless Bush voters face a serious threat of a draft they will continue to evade reality and opt for pro war politicians. I believe mercenary armies naturally lead to imperialism. What the military discovered in Viet Nam was that they couldn't fight an imperialist war with draftees. They ended up with a demoralized army, that often had problems with drug abuse and sometimes threatened officers.
They ended up with ordinary moms and dads in front of the White House yelling "Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today!"
You will also note a strong correlation between the end of the Draft and the end of the antiwar protest movement. These ended long before the war ended. This is why militarists like Rumsfeld are strongly opposed to the draft.
You will also note that Conservative yuppies like PJ O'Rourke that opposed the war in Viet Nam because they were too busy smoking pot to let the war spoil their fun, now support this war in Iraq.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/770chlec.asp
"(7) You say that we won the war, but we're losing the peace because Iraq is so unstable. When Iraq was stable, it attacked Israel in the 1967 and 1973 wars. It attacked Iran. It attacked Kuwait. It gassed the Kurds. It butchered the Shiites. It fostered terrorism in the Middle East. Who wants a stable Iraq?
(8) No, it turns out Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction. And how crazy does that make Saddam? All he had to do was tell Hans Blix, "Look anywhere you want. Look under the bed. Look beneath the couch. Look behind the toilet tank in the third presidential palace on the left, but keep your mitts off my copies of Maxim." And Saddam could have gone on dictatoring away until Donald Rumsfeld gets elected head of the World Council of Churches. But no . . .
(9) You say I didn't have the answers in Iraq? Well, what were the questions? Was there this bad man? Was he running a bad country? That did bad things? Did it have a lot of oil money to do bad things with? Was it going to do more bad things? If those were the questions, was the answer "more time to let international sanctions and U.N. weapons inspections do their job"? No, the answer was blow the place to bits
(10) You say I didn't have a plan for the post-war problem of Iraq? I say we blew the place to bits--what's the problem?
(11) Yes, blowing a place to bits leaves a mess behind. But it's a mess without a military to fight aggressive wars. A mess without the facilities to develop dangerous weapons. A mess that can't systematically kill, torture, and oppress millions of its own citizens. It's a mess with a message--don't mess with us!
(12) Saddam Hussein was reduced to the Unabomber--Ted Kaczynski--a nutcase hiding in the sticks. Sure, the terrorism by his supporters is frightening. Hence, its name, "terrorism." Killing innocent people by surprise is not called "a thousand points of light." But, as frightening as terrorism is, it's the weapon of losers. The minute somebody sets off a suicide bomb, you can be sure that person doesn't have "career prospects." And no matter how horrendous a terrorist attack is, it's still conducted by losers. Winners don't need to hijack airplanes. Winners have an Air Force."
http://homepage.eircom.net/~odyssey/Politics/Liberty/PJ.html
"Like many men of my generation, I had an opportunity to give war a chance, and I promptly chickened out. I went to my draft physical in 1970 with a doctor's letter about my history of drug abuse. The letter was four and a half pages long with three and a half pages devoted to listing the drugs I'd abused. I was shunted into the office of an Army psychiatrist who, at the end of a forty-five minute interview with me, was pounding his desk and shouting, "You're fucked up! You don't belong in the Army!" He was certainly right on the first count and possibly right on the second. Anyway, I didn't have to go. But that, of course, meant someone else had to go in my place. I would like to dedicate this book to him.
I hope you got back in one piece, fellow. I hope you were more use to your platoon mates than I would have been. I hope you're rich and happy now. And in 1971, when somebody punched me in the face for being a long-haired peace creep, I hope it was you."
I believe a draft would end the war very quickly. I am not the only person against the war who feels this way. Noam Chomsky has made the same observation.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/15/1448219
NOAM CHOMSKY: I think it's extremely unlikely. I should tell you this as a word of personal background. I was very much involved in the resistance movement in the 1960's. In fact, I was just barely -- the only reason I missed a long jail sentence is because the Tet Offensive came along and the trials were called off. So I was very much involved in the resistance, but I was never against the draft. I disagreed with a lot of my friends and associates on that, for a very good reason, I think at least as nobody seems to agree. In my view, if there's going to be an army, I think it ought to be a citizen's army. Now, here I do agree with some people, the top brass, they don't want a citizen's army. They want a mercenary army, what we call a volunteer army. A mercenary army of the disadvantaged. And in fact, in the Vietnam war, the U.S. military realized, they had made a very bad mistake. I mean, for the first time I think ever in the history of European imperialism, including us, they had used a citizen's army to fight a vicious, brutal, colonial war, and civilians just cannot do that kind of a thing. For that, you need the French foreign legion, the Gurkhas or something like that. Every predecessor has used mercenaries, often drawn from the country that they're attacking like England ran India with Indian mercenaries. You take them from one place and send them to kill people in the other place. That's the standard way to run imperial wars. They're just too brutal and violent and murderous. Civilians are not going to be able to do it for very long. What happened was, the army started falling apart. One of the reasons that the army was withdrawn was because the top military wanted it out of there. They were afraid they were not going to have an army anymore. Soldiers were fragging officer. The whole thing was falling apart. They were on drugs. And that's why I think that they're not going to have a draft. That's why I'm in favor of it. If there's going to be an army that will fight brutal, colonial wars, and that's the only likely kind of war, I'm not talking about the militarization of space and that kind of thing, I mean ground wars, it ought to be a citizen's army so that the attitudes of the society are reflected in the military.
I think the hippy emphasis on the draft was the wrong one. It just appeals to self interest, and once the draft ends those rich kids that benefit stop protesting the war. I am pro-Peace, pro-Draft!
Am I the only one that feels this way?