Get Ready for the Draft

Get ready, folks. Reagan used to say, "You ain't seen nothing yet," when he was campaigning for his second term. The audience cheered because they were so happy with him. You're about to hear Bush say the equivalent in his second term, as he tries so desperately to save himself. This time you won't hear people cheer.

Do you remember the unity we had during those months after 9/11? It's hard to remember, isn't it, after almost four years of a catastrophic war. We've had so much disunity, when we need to fight as one. Bush said he wants to be a uniter, not a divider. He showed no more honesty or abiity there than he has with anything else. We still need the unity and patriotism we all felt so naturally five years ago. We can have it with different leadership. But we are about to become more divided than ever.

I'm talking about the draft, of course. Bush announced this week that he has asked Defense Secretary Gates to develop a plan to expand our ground forces. Gates' first task is to fly to Baghdad and come back with recommendations to help Bush pull his irons out of the fire. His second task is to expand the size of our armed forces. Stand aside, James Baker. Stand aside, Sandra Day O'Connor, Leon Panetta, Lee Hamilton, and Robert Gates himself. We have some new policies to make here. We're going to make ourselves a new plan.

I don't want to mock these fellows too much. You know they keep trying. A drowning man keeps trying, too. With these gentleman, you can't tell if they're flailing, failing, or just falling. I had some respect for Gates, and I still do. But he has just joined a losing team, and no one, not even Gates, can save this season. Not in two years. It's a big deal now that Bush admits the war is not going well. He's quick, my man. We need some perceptions and reactions a little more nimble than that, though.

So let's go back to the draft, here. It's easy to start ridiculing and mocking: it might be therapeutic to an extent, but I'm not sure it helps beyond that. I don't want to take up the arguments for and against the draft in the abstract. Compulsory national service is something a lot of people have argued for. A voluntary armed force is something others have favored, and I'm with them. Service in the military, or more broadly, service to one's country, brings out a lot of interesting problems. It may be time to take those up now, but not at the moment. At the moment we have to look at the particulars of Bush's order to Gates.

No one wants to serve in this war. Well, that's not exactly true. People who have served in Iraq want to go back and serve with their buddies. A shared experience like that is a powerful force, and it's great that unit cohesiveness has remained so strong. Those guys over there are fighting a hard war, and their morale as they go through this thing is amazing. As we disagree here about what to do next, we have to remember to support those soldiers over there, especially now at Christmas time.

We have other people who would like to serve. But for the most part, people don't want to join. What a sad outcome, after pouring out our desire to help after 9/11. Everyone wanted to join in and contribute then. I wanted to see if I could join our intelligence services that fall: I could use my training in my country's service there. Now, young people won't join, and their parents don't want them to. They recognize that this conflict wastes our young people's lives.

The rationale behind Bush's request is reasonable enough. He says we need a larger force for the long term war on terror. What he leaves out is why our force is so small. Why has the Iraq war almost broken it. If Bush had not started the war in Iraq, if he had maintained and nurtured the unity that so clearly held people together during those difficult months five years ago, we would have long lines at recruiting centers across the land. The recruiters would be turning young people away, unable to process and train so many, so fast. Not so, now. Recruiters have had such a hard time in every respect, trying to persuade qualified young people that they ought to join. Why should that be, in the middle of a war? Why should people turn away from the armed services after 9/11? The answer to that one is simple. Bush started a bad war, and people don't want to fight it. Our all-volunteer force is formed to fight necessary wars, and the war in Iraq is certainly not necessary.

So now our president says he wants to expand our armed forces. It's another admission failure, but he would never state it that way. What's he going to do? He started a war he can't win, and the only option he sees is to clear and protect more neighborhoods in Baghdad. For that he needs more troops, he says. Gates, get me more troops! Let's see what Gates does. He could ignore the request. That's not so likely for a guy who just took office. He'll want to impress the boss with a prompt response. He could weasel around the question, and avoid the tough nut at the center of it. That's hardly more impressive than not responding at all, I should think.

The tough nut is that if we want to send more troops to Iraq, or anywhere, for that matter, we need more troops in our standing force. We need more troops in our standing force right now because we haven't been able to recruit enough volunteers to meet our country's needs. The only way to make up that shortfall is to restart the draft. Do you think our young people will be more meek about this matter than their parents and grandparents were two generations ago. Do you think the people who fought Vietnam, both over there in the jungles and here on the college campuses, are going to let their sons and daughters be slaughtered by homemade bombs in Baghdad? I sure hope they don't.

The interesting thing is, we already have a so-called backdoor draft. That means a draft that's not visible, and that exploits people who can't resist it very well. It preys on national guardsmen and reservists who, with a more than a foot in the military's door, can't escape its demands. If I were governor of one of our states, the first thing I would do is say to my constituents and to the federal government: you're not going to get one more national guardsmen from this state. Not one. No, not one. Our units are going to stay here, where they belong. I know that the legal grounds for a stand like that are shakey. I know it places a lot of people in an awkward situation, and it invites more calumny than any governor appears prepared to handle. But someone should do it. If a lot of other states joined in, the federal government would have to listen.

The backdoor draft forces guardsmen and reservists out into war for tour after tour, when they should be home with their families. These aren't volunteers. They aren't doing what they volunteered to do. I know what I'm talking about here. I volunteered for the United States Naval Reserve in the late 1970s. I became a young naval officer not long after the Vietnam war ended. I thought quite a lot about what I would do, after I joined, if I had to fight in a bad war. More precisely, I asked myself if that possibility should make me not join in the first place. I knew that if we went to war and I had to fight, I'd do it. But I had to think about whether I should put myself in a position where I had to fight in a war that shouldn't be fought. It was easy to ask questions like that in the 1970s, when the memory of Vietnam was so fresh.

The people subject to the backdoor draft now don't have an opportunity to ask questions like that. They joined the armed services under one set of circumstances. Now the country asks them to fight in a war that is beyond stupid. They know that dying in Baghdad won't serve a purpose that American citizens recognize or sanction. The Iraqi people sure don't want their help. That's the best Bush can come up with at the end of this pointless trek: we have to help the Iraq people achieve stability and democracy. We have to help them with their security. But they sure don't want our help. When people who are in the middle of a civil war don't want your help, get out of the way. When you are fighting an insurgency and your current methods don't work, think again. Regroup, and rethink what you're doing. That's all the Baker report asked for.

It's time to sign off, I believe. I don't even know if Gates and the generals will recommend a draft. We're all proud of our all-volunteer force. It that too becomes a casualty of this war, that'll be another major loss we can attribute to Bush's leadership. How many bad things can happen? How many ideals will this leader smash. Our all-volunteer force was the pride of the nation before 9/11. It doubled in prestige after the attack, as did our admiration for it. Now we can't even get enough people to volunteer, while our enemies in Iraq wear us down. How did we come to this pass? How did we descend into such trouble? Bush reminds us what harm an irresponsible, incompetent leader can do.

If Gates and the generals do recommend a draft, it's hard to know what will follow. How rapidly and systematically would a draft be put in place? How would people react to it? The machinery takes a bit to assemble, and we would have some discussion about how to make the draft fair. We might well resume the lottery system that existed before the all-volunteer force went into effect. Whatever policies we pursue to expand our armed forces, we shouldn't expect such a transition to be smooth. Our citizens have been so meek after 9/11, I almost wonder whether we have the heart now to resist a draft. People say that the reason we don't have big war protests now, by comparison with the 60s, is that we have no draft. We may find out soon enough if that theory is correct. Will Bush manage to stir up a hornet's nest here, too. Or will our response look like flies around a cowpie in the summertime?

One factor may be whether the president can keep the draft off the college campuses. That was such an important factor in the sixties. Non-college students couldn't get a deferment, they couldn't congregate, they couldn't organize, they couldn't make plans together. Now we have the internet for communication and organization, but how effective will those tools be for people who want to mount resistance? It's just not clear whether people have the heart. There's such discouragement in connection with the war: so much discouragement that it seems to displace anger. Ineffective anger just leaves you worn out and depressed. You might as well go straight for discouragement and conserve some energy.

What could a good leader do? A good leader would break us out of this discouraged frame of mind. A good leader would energize people and give them a reasonable outlet for their optimism. A good leader would give people hope. We're not going to see that from this White House. This White House has failed, and the people in it must be starting to realize it. You won't see hope or direction or anything but self-serving ploys and progaganda from that quarter. If the White House wants to start the war at home, they've picked up the one issue that might start it. Get ready. The draft isn't here yet, but get ready.