I agree with Bob Herbert - reinstate the draft

[MISSDem]

If you want to get a little bit of a sense of what the wars are like in Afghanistan and Iraq — a small, distant sense of the on-the-ground horror — pick up a book of color photos called, “2nd Tour, Hope I Don’t Die.” It’s chilling.
Most Americans have conveniently put these two absurd, obscene conflicts out of their minds. There’s an economy to worry about and snappy little messages to tweet. Nobody wants to think about young people getting their faces or their limbs blown off. Or the parents, loaded with antidepressants, giving their children and spouses a final hug before heading off in a haze of anxiety to their third or fourth tour in the war zones.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/opinion/25herbert.html?_r=1

[Captain Hilts]

1. I support a limited draft as well. It's a crime how troops go over so many times.

If it's so important, than the whole country should be making an effort.

Capt. Hilts is NOT a veteran, but IS a platelet donor at Walter Reed.

[salguine]

9. Why limited? In for a penny, in for a pound, I say. If you're going to do it, go all out.

[Captain Hilts]

14. We don't need an army of millions. nt

[Jakes Progress]

32. We would never get one.

If all the CEO's kids were eligible to be called up and put into service without even the strings that bush pulled for sub-bush, we would not be at war.

[comtec]

20. Republicants and libersucm first!!!

If someone's a Birther strap a gun on them and send their worthless ass over!

We could call it the hanity brigade!

Fucking conservatives, they aways send the young, liberal minded to die for their wars, never do they do it themselves unless forced!

[Lorax7844]

23. Sorry but as the mother of two young boys Herbert can shut it

[ejpoeta]

2. a lot more people would be involved if there were a draft. right now it is out of sight out of mind

and doesn't seem to effect many people's lives. My niece's husband is set to be deployed in the beginning of september. He is headed to Iraq and my niece is due with their child in february.... they are so young!! got married last summer and she is only 18 and he is 21 (i hope he is cuz he drinks.) Becky will be coming back to NY while ryan is gone and she'll stay with her mom and dad. I worry so much for ryan... if there is anything that can direct attention away from michael jackson and the other noise out there... it would be the potential for every young male and female to be drafted into service. you can bet their parents would not go for that.... but i don't want just the poor kids to go then.... i don't want the richie riches to be able to get their kids out of it. none of this crap like dick cheney got away with and dubya....

[Captain Hilts]

15. BINGO. They're an expendable class because they're someone else's kids. nt

[customerserviceguy]

3. Let the Repukes enact it

If it happens under President Obama, it will be way too much LBJ all over again.

[MichiganVote]

5. Draft republicans, they wanted all this crap anyway.

[lib_wit_it]

21. They should have been volunteering in droves for the wars they wanted so badly. The draft can

just decide the order in which they should go.

[MISSDem]

6. But these are Obama's wars now.

So at least for the next three and a half years whatever happens is on him. And the bodies are piling up.

[customerserviceguy]

10. Quite true

Within my lifetime, the great Presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson was ruined by not knowing when to cut one's losses in Vietnam. I don't think that's as big a worry with Iraq, but I do think so for dead certain in Afghanistan.

[county worker]

4. I hope you will put your ass where your mouth is!

Sure, you have nothing to risk! Send someone else in your place.

I was drafted and sent to Vietnam. We should never do that again! No war of convenience is worth the life of one person's child!

Not to mention how many years it takes a person to get over the consequences of being in a war!

[MISSDem]

7. Why are you angry at Bob Herbert (or is it me)?

We did not start these wars and we both want them ended NOW! Else, re-instate the draft and let everyone participate.

[Warren Stupidity]

12. The draft enables more and bigger wars.

[The Hope Mobile]

28. Agreed!

Possibly the main reason we aren't in Iran and/or N Korea yet.

[county worker]

37. I'm saying that if you believe in participating go a head and join the war and put your ass on the

line!

Don't send other people to do your fighting for you! Oh by the way, I hope I never hear the term "chicken hawk" come from you!

[digidigido]

43. uh, I hate to break it to you, but we did start these wars

[MISSDem]

51. Uh, I meant that Bob Herbert nor I started these wars.

I know the U.S. did. duh

[Butch350]

22. I put my money where my mouth is.

I WASN'T DRAFTED during Nam - I joined!

If the draft is reinstated I bet that would get those overly patriotic re-pug-bots to call for an end
to the excessive deaths and war budgets.

[JTFrog]

26. Exactly! If there had been a draft when Cheney and Rush were of age....

Oh wait....

:eyes:

[Enthusiast]

30. I agree with you when you say this.

"We should never do that again! No war of convenience is worth the life of one person's child!"

I agree 100%.

BUT, and it's a big but. If this country is actually threatened enough to have to fight a war, everyone should share in the sacrifice and a military draft is the best way to accomplish this. JMHO.

[county worker]

35. We were not threatened by North Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin incident did not happen.

I am not trying to argue with you here.

We were not threatened by Iraq or Afghanistan. We should not draft our children to fight because we want the war to end! That is like killing for peace!

End the fucking wars by cutting off the spending! Don't send more people to die.

[Enthusiast]

44. I agree.

The Vietnam war, like Iraq and Afghanistan wars, was not justified. One might make the case for Afghanistan War but even that is on shaky ground.

[Rick Myers]

8. I completely support a draft!

Now!

[springhill]

19. So I suppose you are going to be fine with your 18 year old being drafted?

Oh, you don't have any draft age kids, how convenient. Well I do, and I will not see him go off to fight an illegal war.

[Jakes Progress]

33. You don't get it.

There would not be a war if senators and CEO's had to worry about their kids getting called.

Kind of slimy to let others go when you know you won't have to.

[DrZeeLit]

42. EXACTLY!!!

I wrote a whole "outcry" about this below.

The "hell no we won't go" would be soooooo loud that the Republicans would have to vote against war.
It would be put up or shut up.

Just the threat of it would send shivers down their chicken hawk spines.

Because... it's easy to vote for war when you know not many of your constituents will bear the burden of that vote.

It was the draft that led the protest against Vietnam.
I'm a professor at a college now. The majority of the kids don't care a bit about this war. They aren't going, so it doesn't exist. They are apathetic at best. It's very sad.
I worry so much about my National Guard students. They've been back 2 or 3 times to Afghanistan or Iraq. And when they return, they can't focus on school. How can they come back and try to sit in a classroom with a bunch of yahoos who only want to party? They've seen life and death and carried a weapon in a war zone.

So, I support a draft so that our "leadership" will never actually send anyone to war again -- the draft would be so unpopular as to insure election defeat for anyone who supported war if we had the draft.
Thus, no one would want to cast the vote for war.

[MISSDem]

52. I think that, in essence, this is what Bob Herbert is saying.

and I agree with you.

[Warren Stupidity]

11. Not this shit again.

No.

Fuck no.

[MasonJar]

13. I support the draft. It would cut down on wars for sure. Also an army recruit

or even career officer did not sign up for multiple tours in very few years. It did not happen in Vietnam because of the draft. Our military is being destroyed, driven mad.

[katkat]

18. read stuff before you sign it. n/t

[county worker]

36. Did the draft stop Vietnam? It lasted 10 fucking years!

Johnson could escalate because he had the troops to escalate with! McNamara said they were escalating even though they knew they could not win!

[digidigido]

45. Actually the people rioting in the street because they their friends or their children were

were being drafted and killed stopped the war. So Yes, the fact that their was a draft that
people like Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz and Perle had to get out of serving in did in fact help
provide impetus to ending the war. When major intersections of cities are shut down and
people are rioting it can produce results. The Right Wing learns from history. That's why
they privitized the war with blackwater

[county worker]

48. You are delusional. The war went on year after year riots or no riots!

What ended the war was the realization that we could not win it!

I was in the Saigon area during TET. We were fighting in the streets of Ben Hoa! The protests went on and on. What did we do after that? We bombed the North to try to get them to offer peace terms. The war went on for 5 more years. Americans got tired of it. That's why it ended. The draft only added more fodder for the canons!

[LastLiberal in PalmSprings]

47. What helped end the war was ending deferments

For a long time you could get a deferment for (1) being in college, (2) being married or (3) having kids. There were probably a lot of other ways to avoid the draft -- ask Cheney, he seemed to know them all. Basically, if you were from a middle class or wealthy family the chances of going to 'Nam was relatively low.

Anyway, about 1969 they ended deferments and instituted a lottery. Low numbers got drafted, high numbers could breathe again. (My number was 345, although it was academic since I had signed up for ROTC.) What the lottery did was to add middle class children to the mix of cannon fodder being sent to 'Nam, which had been feeding nearly exclusively on the children of the poor. All of a sudden Vietnam stopped being an abstract idea and became very real to the middle class, and that's when the anti-war movement took off.

It didn't hurt that Walter Cronkite made a second trip to Vietnam and changed his opinion from "Gee, whiz! War is great fun!" (the Air Force had let him fly on a B-57 bombing run during his first visit) to "Why are we sacrificing our young men in a war that can't be won?"

It took a couple of more years for the public's anger to build, but when it did the politicians buckled and sought "peace with honor" (i.e., CYA).

I think that's where we are re: health care. We could have gotten single payer had Obama hit the ground running with a clear message. He's been following the creed, "There they go and I must follow, for I am their leader," and it's taking a while for the 80% that want some sort of relief from the tyranny of the insurance companies to realize that if they want it they'll have to fight for it. Fight clean, fight dirty but fight as if your life depends upon it, because it does.

As Howard Beale said, "First you've got to get angry!"

[county worker]

49. The deferments were ended sometime after 1966. I was drafted in 1966 before the change.

The war lasted 6 more years after I was drafted! The draft did not end the war. Losing it to the North ended the war. Americans got tired of fighting and wanted to pull out. We did and the North took over. All the draft did was add more bodies to the fight!

[Doctor_J]

16. It won't happen, so these periodic pleas are stupid

really, really stupid at this point.

[katkat]

17. No draft

What if they gave a war and nobody came.

[bertman]

24. Combine reinstating the draft with getting REAL news coverage instead of embedded

journalism and we would see these wars come to a screech halt by popular demand. Just reinstating the draft will have the same effect but will take much longer.

The simple act of making everyone's children potential soldiers demands that citizens become actively aware of what their government is doing in their names. As it is now, many Americans cherish their armchair patriot status because they are sacrificing nothing. It's sad, but true.

Recommend.

[deadmessengers]

25. I would support it, IF...

I would support a draft if, and only if, there were specific protections written into the law enabling the draft that would prevent the children of the wealthy and powerful from weaseling out of their obligations. (see: GWB, Dan Quayle)

Since such a provision is infinitesimally unlikely to be allowed by the powers that run this country, then no, sorry.

[Martin Eden]

27. Be careful what you ask for.

If you think a military draft in this country would curtail our military intervention overseas, you are ignoring political reality.

Bob Herbert was spot-on about everything in his OP, except for the fact that the draft will not be re-instated unless there is sufficient support from a public that is willing to send their sons/husbands/brothers or themselves overseas into the line of fire. Under what circumstances would that support materialize? Only if REAL threats and/or conflicts erupted that are MUCH worse than than what we have seen in Iraq & Afghanistan.

Who wants that?

There will be NO credible push for a draft in this country without a dire need. It's a political third rail much hotter than Social Security. Oh, you may find some politicians suggesting it but that can be chalked up to rhetorical arguments for/against US militarism. How many people do you know right or left that wants to subject themselves or their loved ones to conscription?

If the power to vastly increase the number of Americans being sent into battle is reinstated, you better believe that power will be excercised -- because the public will first have to be convinced of its necessity.

[Seldona]

29. A draft?

It's a political loser that will only ensure even more death and destruction. It won't be the kids of the people who started, and profit, off these wars who will be forced to fight.

[DrZeeLit]

31. I agree, too. Reinstate the draft. I want to see the sons and daughers of Goldman Sachs going off

to the war that has provided their mothers and fathers with such fine reward.

I'm not saying many of those sons and daughters haven't proudly and selflessly enlisted, but I'm betting not.
It's only fair they "pay" their fair share.
I teach at a small Vermont state college where an inordinate number of students sign on for the National Guard to pay for college.
To earn the right to an education, they put themselves in harms way and so doing, protect all of us.

I'd just like to see ALL able-bodied students (and non-students), men and women, be called upon for that same duty. And answer that call.

Until EVERYONE is treated equally on this score the message that war doesn't solve our problems won't get through to the other side.
The other side (usually chicken hawks with a failing philosophy in hand) have nothing to lose -- they rarely send their own kids to fight a war that the peons can fight.

Bravo, Herbert.

[county worker]

38. You can't treat everyone evenly by the draft!

We draft young people. We send them to war to be killed or maimed for life and so mentally screwed up they may never have a normal life.

That doesn't happen to older people or younger kids. Having a son or daughter die in war is nothing to having to fight in it!

I wish that everyone who wanted a draft would have to be the first to go to war. I'll bet there would be less call for draft then!


And to want to send somebody's kid to war so it will end is a very selfish thing to do. You want the war to end work to end the war don't send more people to die! Killing for peace is not the way we should live!

[DrZeeLit]

41. Actually, the point Herbert and others make is that a draft means no war

And I totally GET that we draft young people.
Do you want to know how many names I have on that wall in D.C. -- you know...that big black monolith with 58000 names on it?
That's my generation carved on that black marble.
Carved in blood on that black marble.
And what did they die for? Tell me... what?
Nothing.
I can't go to DC and look at that wall without sobbing my heart out.


And how did the draft FEEL? It was REAL. It was PALPABLE. Visceral.
Heart-in-your-throad fear...
And we sat glued to the television as the draft numbers were pulled from a lottery of birthdays.
If your number was up... it was either wait to get taken by the draft, or enlist.
Or like Baby Bush, get your rich daddy to find you a spot in the National Guard.

But the draft began to level the playing field. Sure.... many avoided the draft, but they had to work a bit to do it.
So the burden of going to war wasn't solely on the shoulders of the poor, uneducated, or unconnected.
I believe, but am not certain, that a disproportionate number of African-Americans and Hispanic males were caught up in the war for whatever reasons.

You really do not understand the argument for draft.
We do NOT want a war. No.
What we believe is... if everyone HAD TO GO into the service -- and this country has generation after generation signed up only men at their 18th birthday but it could be women, too -- if everyone regardless of income, race, or gender, was placed into a pool and we said that's who we will take....

If that happened.....

The OUTCRY would be so loud.... the "hell no, we won't go" would be SO LOUD -- as to be heard from every mountain and valley in this nation.

And.... they (the powers that be) would really really really THINK HARD about sending anybody to war. They would, in essence, STOP WAR.

Because nobody can be drafted right now, the Iraq War (and to a lesser degree The Afghan War) have had not much impact on the draftable population, hence no outcry.
YES, young men and women are being sent. Over and over and over again.
But nobody (except people who always care, like me and you and so many here) is out in the street PROTESTING this war.
I joined several marches, but Bush wasn't listening.

I don't think you "get" what we meant when we say "reinstate the draft."
It would mean Republicans would have to put up or shut up. They don't want to face their constituents on that issue. See... it's fine if they vote to go to war, BUT it's NOT fine if they send somebody's kid via a draft.

And that's the point. If everybody of draftable age -- and that's the range of about 18-35 -- was in the cross-hairs... you would really see some action on these wars.
Over.
Fast.

So, I hope you understand. We are making this argument because we are AGAINST WAR.

[county worker]

50. You have names on the Wall? I have buddies on the Wall!

I have neighborhood friends on the wall, I have buddies from the war on the Wall. Don't tell me about names on the Wall! I was drafted in 1966 and sent to Vietnam in 1967.


The draft does not end wars! It only adds more people to the fighting.

You have a theory that the draft will end the war. In reality the draft did not end the Vietnam war. The draft lasted at least 6 years or more. The war didn't end because people were sending their kids to die. It ended because we got tired of fighting it. Just like we are tired of Iraq now. Congress cut of the spending. For each person marching against the war in the streets there were two who backed the war!

[DrZeeLit]

53. I'm sorry you lost friends in the war. So did I. It's not a contest. We just don't agree.

Your anger is apparent.
But I really don't think I did anything to deserve it.

Hopefully, either way, we both work for the same end: no more war.

[Jakes Progress]

34. We need one, but not

the one we had. This one would have to be without exemptions and absolutely without the influence of the rich and powerful. Something like a 20 yr sentence for attempting to subvert the rules so a rich kid can duck it.

[Fire1]

39. I say go back to burning draft cards. n/t

[MISSDem]

40. IMHO, Bob Herbert doesn't actually want a draft but he,

as do I, believes that if you are going to insist in having a war then have a draft too. Everyone should have to shoulder the burden in some way.

[BirminghamExaminer]

46. I'm ashamed to say this, but not until my two sons and daughter are too old....

Selfish, but true. My youngest son is gay so I suppose he wouldn't have to go anyway. The middle is a girl and she is 20 and in college too. I can't imagine her with a gun in her hand. The oldest is 24 and in graduate school...I'm not sure if he would be first on the draft pick. I feel like a horrible person for saying these things. But I remember Vietnam. My husband is a vietnam vet.