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Casting the deciding vote on the draft

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I’ve made the from the left pro-draft arguments on numerous occasions in the last year or so. Mostly, I’ve done it with students, especially in my Intro to Poli Sci for Art students class. Pedagogically, it’s great: it disrupts the continuity of their thinking, and exposes potentially conservative consequences of their hyper-individualism, which sits in uneasy tension with their professed leftism.

Of course, eventually, they figure out Pollitt’s point–that drafts are not really all that likely to be egalitarian and fair in practice, and I cheerfully concede the point. My advocacy of a draft is almost entirely hypothetical.

I do say almost, though. Rob suggests, in his comment in response to Scott, that the draft isn’t a ridiculous solution to the problem in Iraq. If he means this as a short term solution, I’m going to have to side with Scott. Two questions must be posed. First, when has the Bush administration ever undertaken a major policy initiative (with good, evil or neutral ends) that hasn’t been more or less fucked up? I mean, can you name one? Second, when has the Bush administration ever done anything with actual egalitarian intent?

The draft only makes sense to me as a longer term solution; part of an instillation of military (or other) service as a consistent requirement for all. We’ll never get rid of all cushy exceptions for the rich kids, of course, but it’s entirely possible for a national service scheme to be significantly more egalitarian than what we’ve had in the past and I think there are examples of that in countries in Europe and elsewhere.

Of course, such a scheme, to have any hope of functioning, would have to be designed by a government of competence and a modicum of egalitarian intent. I’m not such a cynic to think that we never have governments that don’t meet that limited criteria, but I do know that the idea would be so wildly unpopular and thoroughly resisted that it’s a bit of a non-starter. The problem may be rather similar to the problem of why serious gun control measures aren’t likely to do a whole lot of good here in the U.S.–the cultural cat is out of the bag.

On the issue of military culture and the problem of a hyper-right wing military, I’m inclined to think Rob’s correct that it is a problem, and I don’t really know what to do about it. Perhaps Bush’s disasterous war and his reliance on the council of dreamy idealistic chickenhawk neo-cons over sober military analysts will give a few military people pause about their assessments of Bush and Clinton.

Or maybe affirmative action for liberals in the military? David Horowitz thinks that’s a good idea for conservatives in academia, so why not?

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