The fervid dream of the various blogs for the Donkle is to paint the just-passed midterm election as a rebuke of the dauphin's foreign policy. And yet here is Charles Rangle:
Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) has long advocated returning to the draft, but his efforts drew little attention during the 12 years that House Democrats were in the minority. Starting in January, however, he will chair the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee. Yesterday he said "you bet your life" he will renew his drive for a draft.Color me a literalist, but I do believe he's proposing a plan for the purpose of facilitating the president's foreign adventurism.
"I will be introducing that bill as soon as we start the new session," Rangel said on CBS's "Face the Nation." He portrayed the draft, suspended since 1973, as a means of spreading military obligations more equitably and prompting political leaders to think twice before starting wars.
"There's no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids from their communities would be placed in harm's way," said Rangel, a Korean War veteran. "If we're going to challenge Iran and challenge North Korea and then, as some people have asked, to send more troops to Iraq, we can't do that without a draft."
As with any utterance of longer than a sentence by a congressbeing, there are several fatuities and at least one major contradiction at work here: the matter of "spreading military obligations more equitably" and the matter of "prompting political leaders to think twice before starting wars." The dauphin can take comfort in coming in a mere second place in the last week's contest to determine which American official could engage in the most patently untrue reminiscences about "the lessons of Vietnam." The dauphin is himself a living counterexample to the proposition of the draft as redistributive of personal military obligations to empire, as is much of the male population of the current US Congress. As for political leaders "think[ing] twice before starting wars," it is a hard-learned fact that political leaders can think any number of times about anything and always arrive at the same conclusion. Wars, above all, are the black holes of American political thought; it swirls around the event horizon, but it can't escape.
Of course, there's also the awkward history that in both Vietnam and Korea before it, the draft didn't make the government think twice about war; it encouraged politicians, rather, to follow the McCain path of easy escalation. Whether once-, twice-, or thrice-thought, the wars will still be fought, and there lies the major contradiction. On one hand, Rangle proposes the draft as some kind of restraint on the warmaking inclinations of our government; on the other hand, he proposes the draft as a panacea to the manpower problems brought on by the warmaking inclinations of our government. Both a restraint and a catalyst! Someone call the chemists.
I am sure that Markos Moulitas can write an essay, though, on why a reinstituted draft is another good reason for libertarians to support Democrats.
7 comments:
No, IOZ - you're wrong on this one and it's because you've become a prisoner of your own puristics.
Wrong how? Wrong that conscription isn't an impediment to states waging war? Wrong that the wealthy, educated, and well-connected remain underrepresented in consprict armies? Wrong that Rangle talks out of one side of his mouth about the restraint necessitated by a draft and out of the other about the boon of increased conscript manpower to American military activities? Or wrong about libertarian opposition to forced service?
I think those are the bullet points.
I'm pretty sure Rangel's bill will fail in a bipartisan manner, just like it has every year he's proposed it. It is in no way representative of Democrats, but it gets a lot of press (as it is designed to do).
I think, or hope, that Anonymous was being facetious. The jibe about being a "prisoner of puristics" is the Democratic knee jerk to common sense. That one looked deliverately ludicrous.
The draft has a lot of appeal to technocratic liberals. Their solution to immorality and bad management is to fix the people being managed, with ostensibly egalitarian shares of misery. This, through some magic transformation, will make management good and moral.
the vietnam era war resistance was almost entirely populated and powered by draft-age students and student sympathisers. nixon's abolition of the draft was his greatest gift to the empire, creating a military purchased, not kidnapped. you wanna see protests in DC on a scale unimaginable, try kidnapping this, the most indulged and self-preserving generation yadda yadda for this or any mockable future imperial enterprise.
I think, oldfatherwilliam, that in these times, if you actually did see unprecedentedly huge protests in DC we'd see some combination of the latest and greatest antiriot technologies deployed (microwave weapons, flashbang grenades, and rubber bullets with dog bites and horse trampling thrown in for funsies), and Halliburton would be breaking in it's shiny new contract for prison camps, where Gitmoesque maltreatment of prisoners would be the norm (sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme heat or cold, stress positions, etc.). Further, this putative army of dissidents will turn out to have exposed themselves to official abuse for nothing, as it will fail to galvanize that part of the public that is not already engaged in activism, and the powers that be will demonstrate that they can ignore ten million Americans in the streets as easily as they can ten thousand.
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