Matt Zeitlin

There’s been grumbling among certain lefties to return to the draft for one of two reasons – either because it would catalyze an anti war movement or because shared sacrifice is a good thing, on its own. David Sirota, for whom economic collectivism, just ain’t enough – supports the draft for both reasons:

So I say before the antiwar movement comes out angrily opposing the concept of a draft, let’s think carefully about what we are really doing. There’s a good case to be made that if a draft was instituted today, the Iraq War would be over in a matter of weeks because the vast majority of Americans would go from merely telling pollsters they opposed the war, to marching in the street to stop the war for fear that their kids and their friends are going to be getting a one-way ticket to the Baghdad shooting gallery. More long-term, there’s an equally good case to be made that if a draft was instituted today, all of the Beltway’s reflexive talk of going to war with countries like Iran and all the craven career politicians like Rep. Lincoln Davis (D-Tenn.) who are demanding that his colleagues become “pro-war Democrats” would immediately be muzzled for fear of a voter revolt like this country has never seen.

If we want an ongoing antiwar movement, one that actually starts changing the country’s whole attitude towards war as the first tool of international relations, then perhaps we should keep quiet and let the most unpopular president in contemporary American history keep talking about a draft. He may inadvertently scare the country into more antiwar action. But more importantly, the draft concept – which is at its heart a concept of shared sacrifice and national service – has intrinsic long-term value to our movement because if it was instituted, it would likely take out our movement from primarily the politically engaged/interested and overnight broaden it out to the larger mass public.

This argument is flawed for a few reason. First, the draft is just a priori wrong – it is enslaving young men and putting them on the killing fields, and that’s just bad. There’s also something perverse about this logic that a draft would end the war, what if it doesn’t? What if the draft provides the manpower necessary to implement the surge everywhere, allowing military planners to continue the war nearly indefinitely? Surely, when military personnel, like War Tsar Douglas Lute, suggest that a draft might be necessary, they aren’t saying that to spark an anti war movement, they’re saying it because they want more troops. The risk of a draft resulting in entrenching the war is just too high for Sirota’s gambit to be tried.

There’s also a frank misunderstanding of history – When the Vietnam war started, there was conscription, even though the move to a lottery happened in 1970, the build up to the war, Gulf of Tonkin and a great deal of the fighting and casualties happened before the lottery and the subsequent draft based anti war movement. Sirota seems to forget that the Iraq War was broadly quite popular, meaning that even if we had a draft up through March 2003 – the war probably still would have started, and we’d be roughly in the same place we are now, except with more casualties.  The truth is, the American public has been able to support many large-scale wars with a conscription military.  Sirota and many other liberal draft supporters are largely working from a single data point – Vietnam – and that’s hardly the best way to evaluate policies.

Sirota also misrepresents the subsequent history of post-Vietnam war fighting. Because of the volunteer military, our seemingly instinctive tendency to go to war (read Robert Kagan on this) has been tempered by not having enough troops to make these wars large scale. Look at Gulf War I or Panama, these were interventions, and one of them was even a regime change, but because of our small military, we knew better than to get all bogged down.  Gulf War II is the exception to our post Vietnam history of war fighting.

If we had a draft, we’d probably be more likely to pursue large wars of regime change under a neocon president – like Rudy – and then withdraw as soon as things started turning sour.  Imagine if there were another terrorist attack and Rudy or Romney (or even Hillary) was president, we’d take our large, beefed up by the draft military, and probably invade Pakistan and North Korea on principle, and then a few other countries.  Some of the things Americans thought in the 70s were really stupid, like that cocaine or feathered haircuts were cool, the draft being bad…that idea has stood the test of time.