Antiwar.com Blog

Jonathan Schwarz examines the sunny side of Iraq-Vietnam analogies, and Leon Hadar measures Israel’s window of opportunity for attacking Iran.

Several people have written to inform me that Charlie Rangel’s draft proposal is merely a ploy to make war supporters squirm. Well, if it’s a ploy, then Rangel is playing with fire, because there are plenty of liberals out there who have rushed to defend his proposal on egalitarian grounds – and there are plenty of right-wingers who will be happy to read those arguments back to the libs when the Pentagon finally decides it needs more fodder than it can hoodwink into voluntarily enlisting.

Moreover, unless Rangel is simply a liar, it’s not a ploy:

“There’s no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq … 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,” Rangel said Sunday.

Rangel floated the same idea in Congress two years ago, but ended up voting against his own bill, along with 401 other Congress members, when the measure came up just before the presidential election.

At the time, he accused Republicans of rushing it out as a stunt against Democrats instead of giving it a legitimate hearing.

But the soon-to-be chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee said Sunday a draft bill will be no stunt this time, insisting he’s very serious about it.

“You bet your life; underscore serious,” Rangel said on CBS’ Face the Nation Sunday.

Fortunately, Rangel’s constituents, unlike sophisticated liberal know-it-alls, seem duly alarmed:

Along 125th Street in New York City on Sunday, Rangel’s draft plan was met mostly with derision.

“What, he was smoking pot or something?” said 58-year-old James Brown.

“He doesn’t represent the people of Harlem if he’s for the draft,” Neil Davis, 48, said.

Charlie Rangel and other liberals want a return to the draft on the basis of some ahistorical notion that it will prevent future wars. (See here for some background on all the wars conscription hasn’t prevented.) For one thing, as Scott points out below, no draft would ever be imposed without all sorts of loopholes and exemptions the powerful and politically connected could exploit – and if Charlie Rangel is so convinced the conscription of “fortunate sons” would do the trick, then why not propose a targeted draft? Children of elected officials only…

Not that I would support that, either. It’s quite legitimate to ask why – if this war is so critical to America’s well-being – Jenna, Barbara, Chelsea, et al. (not to mention the children of pro-war pundits) aren’t “serving.” But there’s no justice in forcing Jenna, Barbara, Chelsea, et al. to go kill or die because their parents are a**holes.

The draft should be opposed on first principles of individual rights. Besides, the utilitarian antiwar argument for conscription avoids unpleasant fundamental truths. There’s no quick procedural fix for American militarism. Radical cultural changes are necessary to shift this country from an aggressive, imperial posture to a defensive, noninterventionist one. Switzerland is a peaceful country with no expansionist tendencies; Israel, not so much. Mandatory military service in both countries is a rights violation, of course, yet it leads to very different results because Switzerland and Israel have very different societies. Anyone want to guess which of those two societies American elites (and, it must be said, many, many regular folks) believe we should be more like?

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Charles Rangel thinks that having a society where human beings own each other is perfectly okay as long as the slaves are destroying lives and property for the state rather than producing things for private plantation owners.

From USA Today:

“Americans would have to sign up for a new military draft after turning 18 if the incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee has his way.

Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said Sunday he sees his idea as a way to deter politicians from launching wars and to bolster U.S. troop levels insufficient to cover potential future action in Iran, North Korea and Iraq.

‘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,’ Rangel said. …

At a time when some lawmakers are urging the military to send more troops to Iraq, ‘I don’t see how anyone can support the war and not support the draft,’ said Rangel, who also proposed a draft in January 2003, before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.”

Don’t you see? Conscription will deter wars by providing the politicians with a bottomless supply of cannon fodder. And by the new magic principle of “everything works how Charlie wants,” the rest of the politicians will be somehow unable to swing exemptions for their own children.

As for those of us who have priorities other than killing foreigners, well, individual sacrifice for the greater good is the American Way, right?

Comments welcome over at Stress.

LewRockell.com linked to an article of mine today on the servile atmosphere in DC think tanks.  The piece is at the Globalist.com website but, since yesterday, the page with my article has been converted into a membership/registration required page.

Here’s the core:

Many think tanks have become as servile as military bases, as far as providing applause for lies from the highest level of government. Two decades ago, many people expected think tanks to revolutionize politics in Washington, bringing ideas and principles to sordid political clashes. Instead, some think tanks have become nothing more than props for politicians.

The article contrasts the courage of New York organizations fighting U.S. torture with the docility  of Washington think tanks on the same issue.

The full text of the piece is at my blog, where comments and cavilings are welcome.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman has died. He was 94.

I know our readers have a wide range of views regarding his economics, but Friedman deserves the thanks of everyone opposed to conscription. A long-time opponent of the draft, Friedman served on the presidential commission that finally abolished what he forthrightly called a form of slavery. At a conference on the War on Drugs, which he also opposed, Friedman recalled the anti-draft movement as a source of hope for anti-prohibitionists:

Back in the 1940s and 1950s we had a military draft. And I may say, I was just as opposed to the military draft as I now am to the prohibition of drugs. It looked as if you couldn’t get rid of it. It was politically unfeasible to get rid of the draft. We had a conference like this at the University of Chicago; I have forgotten the exact date – sometime in the fifties or early sixties. It was one of the few conferences in which opinions were changed. I hope this will be another. We took a poll at the beginning of the draft conference. We had, just as here, people in favor of the draft, people opposed to the draft-a much wider group than here, including politicians, academicians, and so on. At the beginning of that conference the vote was one-third in favor of the volunteer army and two-thirds in favor of the draft. After three days of the conference, the vote was precisely reversed. Two-thirds expressed themselves in favor of the volunteer army and one-third still in favor of the draft.

I believe that was a major factor in starting the ball rolling, which ultimately got rid of the draft in 1973. 1 believe that this is the same kind of an issue. The evidence is highly persuasive to those who are willing to look at it from the point of view not of one extreme or the other, but of the sensible middle that everybody is looking for. We must change the present policy. I am not without hope that something will happen. At least, the vigor of the attempt at enforcement will lessen.

When specifically asked about foreign policy in a 1995 interview, Friedman was somewhat ambivalent:

Reason: Do you consider yourself in the libertarian mainstream on foreign policy issues?

Friedman: I don’t believe that the libertarian philosophy dictates a foreign policy. In particular I don’t think you can derive isolationism from libertarianism. I’m anti-interventionist, but I’m not an isolationist. I don’t believe we ought to go without armaments. I’m sure we spend more money on armaments than we need to; that’s a different question.

I don’t believe that you can derive from libertarian views the notion that a nation has to bare itself to the outside without defense, or that a strong volunteer force would arise and defend the nation.

Reason: What did you think about the [First] Gulf War?

Friedman: I always had misgivings about the Gulf War, but I never came to a firm decision. It was more nearly justified than other recent foreign interventions, and yet I was persuaded that the major argument used to support it was fallacious.

After all, if Iraq took over the oil, it would have to do something with it. If they don’t want to eat it, they’d have to sell it. I don’t think the price of oil would have been much affected. The more important consideration was the balance of power with Iran and Iraq. I have mixed feelings about that war; I wouldn’t be willing to write a brief on either side.

Yet, as our own David Henderson noted earlier this year, Friedman’s economic insights, when applied to foreign policy, yield decidedly noninterventionist conclusions. And in a July conversation with the Wall Street Journal, the still spry gentleman was flatly opposed to the latest attack on Iraq:

“What’s really killed the Republican Party isn’t spending, it’s Iraq. As it happens, I was opposed to going into Iraq from the beginning. I think it was a mistake, for the simple reason that I do not believe the United States of America ought to be involved in aggression.” Mrs. Friedman – listening to her husband with an ear cocked – was now muttering darkly.

Milton: “Huh? What?” Rose: “This was not aggression!” Milton (exasperatedly): “It was aggression. Of course it was!”