A Blue Eyed Buddhist

I support a draft for military or national service.

Plain and simple. I think it’d be great. I think it should also be simple and very, very straightforward; everyone’s eligible, period. Oh, if you’re medically unable to serve in the military but you get drafted, we’ll find you something else to do- count chairs in some shipping depot somewhere or something- but everyone’s eligible. If you’re a consciencious objector

Married? Got kids? Going to college? 52 years old? Only wage-earner for your family? Doesn’t matter, you’re eligible to get called up, PERIOD.

And if you’ve got a job and your military pay doesn’t cover how much money you made on that job, your employer has to pay you the difference while you’re serving.

Shocking, radical ideas? Yeah, probably. I suppose you could water it down a bit, make some age bands more likely to get called up or something, but I had a realization when I read a blog item today that linked to an editorial column by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert.

Here’s how the column starts:

I spoke recently with a student at Columbia who was enthusiastic about the escalation of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. He argued that a full-blown counterinsurgency effort, which would likely take many years and cost many lives, was the only way to truly win the war.

He was a very bright young man: thoughtful and eager and polite. I asked him if he had any plans to join the military and help make this grand mission a success. He said no.

You see this a lot among right-wingnuts. Oh, they’re all for the war, but you ask a lot of them if their kid is in the military, or if they are going to serve (assuming they’re young enough that the military would take them) and they say “nope”. The war is mostly fought by people that are right in the Democratic wheelhouse- young, poor, brown or black.

Here’s the part that really jumps out:

The idea that fewer than 1 percent of Americans are being called on to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq and that we’re sending them into combat again and again and again — for three tours, four tours, five tours, six tours — is obscene. All decent people should object.

He’s right. We should object. Even most of us on the moderate-to-liberal side of the equation say that we support the troops, but when the rubber meets the road, this nation is not involved and not invested in the wars we’re fighting.

We THINK we are. We might know someone who’s in the military, or know someone who knows someone, but the reality is that it’s nowhere near as pervasive and widespread as military service used to be. There’s no obligation to be subject to the draft. The vast majority of us don’t have to actually truly SACRIFICE anything at all for our military, for our nation.

Well, we should. Our businesses should. Our nation should.

Each and every one of us should have the same chance of being called up and sent into harm’s way as the rest of us. After all, it’s a war for our entire nation, right? Something that we absolutely positively must do? It’s surely not an OPTIONAL war, one that’s okay as long as it doesn’t cost us (personally) too much money, right? I mean, we aren’t the type of people who would only “support the troops” and support making war upon someone else as long as it’s not actually US, personally, that has to go and risk being shot, right?

And gosh, if actually having to risk being called up, handed a rifle, and sent to patrol some souk in a stinky-ass backwater part of the world makes people a little more reluctant to send this nation to war?

That’s okay with me. Let’s start the planning for the new draft, making everyone from, say, 18 to 50, eligible. Let’s really support the troops and support our nation.

Because otherwise, we’re just a bunch of chickenhawks who are more than willing to support a war as long as it’s not OUR ass on the line.

Here’s how Bob Herbert closed out his column:

The air is filled with obsessive self-satisfied rhetoric about supporting the troops, giving them everything they need and not letting them down. But that rhetoric is as hollow as a jazzman’s drum because the overwhelming majority of Americans have no desire at all to share in the sacrifices that the service members and their families are making. Most Americans do not want to serve in the wars, do not want to give up their precious time to do volunteer work that would aid the nation’s warriors and their families, do not even want to fork over the taxes that are needed to pay for the wars.

To say that this is a national disgrace is to wallow in the shallowest understatement. The nation will always give lip-service to support for the troops, but for the most part Americans do not really care about the men and women we so blithely ship off to war, and the families they leave behind.

…

The reason it is so easy for the U.S. to declare wars, and to continue fighting year after year after year, is because so few Americans feel the actual pain of those wars. We’ve been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan longer than we fought in World Wars I and II combined. If voters had to choose right now between instituting a draft or exiting Afghanistan and Iraq, the troops would be out of those two countries in a heartbeat.

I don’t think our current way of waging war, which is pretty easy-breezy for most citizens, is what the architects of America had in mind. Here’s George Washington’s view, for example: “It must be laid down as a primary position and the basis of our system, that every citizen who enjoys the protection of a free government owes not only a proportion of his property, but even his personal service to the defense of it.”

What we are doing is indefensible and will ultimately exact a fearful price, and there will be absolutely no way for the U.S. to avoid paying it.