2008 Woodie Awards
For a short period earlier this year, I became increasingly convinced that there were good grounds for reinstating a military draft. I believed this knowing full well that as a college-age male, I could be among the first to be enlisted. But Michelle Cottle’s article today at TNR making the case for a draft illuminates how wrong I was then. Cottle’s (and my old) argument contains the seed of its own destruction because it avoids addressing the main issue:
With the military’s operational objections to the draft being eroded by its own policies, all those soaring, idealistic arguments in favor of national service start to gain ground: the fundamental justness of expecting all Americans to share in the greatest of citizenship burdens; the need to foster a shared sense of national purpose among young people from all walks of life; the need for the nation’s elites to better understand the military, if only to make well-informed decisions about its structure and function.
The first part here is key: “eroded by its own policies.” The core problem here isn’t that the military has missed its recruiting goals and is on the verge of a manpower crisis; it’s that the Bush administration’s troop-draining, regime-change strategy was flawed at the most fundamental levels. Never mind that a draft is politically infeasible (with about 60% of Americans- and even a few conservative Republicans- favoring some sort of troop withdrawal)- that we’re even having a discussion over the relative merits of bringing back draft highlights that the policymakers invaded a country with no plan to win the peace in the first place. Instead of tacitly accepting the right’s military strategy, progressives need to put serious effort into crafting a different vision of how America should fight the war on terrorism. The recruitment crisis isn’t the problem; it’s a symptom of a bad policy that should be exposed in all its absurdity.
I think that anybody who refuses to acknowledge that we have a virtual draft in this country, as explained by Bob Herbert, has got his / her head in the sand. As my friend Todd Hill has lucidly explained, the neocon military project essentially demands a draft if it’s going to be executable (let’s not even talk about success). My point is that if we’re going to be fighting such a consuming war, we might as well do it in an equitable manner. That means burden-sharing across classes, and a draft is certainly the best way to achieve this.
Then again, the real root of the problem is Bush’s flawed military strategy. If that would change, then we wouldn’t even need to be talking about a draft.
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