BRINGING BACK THE DRAFT?

BRINGING BACK THE DRAFT?

This is a reactionary idea.

Worse, it is wildly impractical in our present military, political, and economic circumstances. So, we will not have a draft just because, say, the national and international security situation under the GOP is deteriorating.

No! The Republicans will hire Croatian mercenaries first. Why not? The money is borrowed, with the eventual tax burden falling on the poor, the young, the non-white, and …the unborn.

So, our free-market military is already sort of an economic draft, which fits into the GOP political scheme: After all, Croatians do not vote here. Actually, Americans do not vote here either, if they have bad credit and live in Texas.

Still, as ever, policing an empire with foreign mercenaries is a bad idea for a republic, but is this still a republic?

The Democratic Party, after all, has no military, political, or economic policies other than what its Congressional leaders can reduce to deals negotiated with the other party. And, again, the GOP is not going to impose a draft, period, certainly not in some sort horse trade with Democrats.

So, that is that.

If Arminius-CHALABI arranges for the slaughter of Varus-WOLFOWITZ's legions in Teutoburg-IRAQ, so be it. Who in our Capitol will restore the republic? Who will even notice, if Fox News filters the reports? Actually, we have already lost two legions in Iraq and Afghanistan, not their standards, of course, but about that many legionaries dead or wounded.

In any case, what we need is not the draft of 1968, or '41, or '17. Those were deformed b the racial policies of the day, "Selective Service" to be precise. In any case, thousands upon thousands of often poorly led, mostly poorly trained, and always poorly armed (albeit lavishly equipped) soldiers such as we fed to the Wehrmachtfrom D-Day to the Huertgen Forest are not what we need today.

We could use a "well regulated militia", however, if we still had one.

We do not.

We have a lot of heterogeneous guns owned by "white homeowners", as the KKK put it after the "Race Riots" of 1917, or by "responsible gun-owners", as the NRA rephrases the same policy today.

The original Swiss-Roman and genuinely republican doctrine embodied in the Second and Third Amendments to the U.S. Constitution was set-aside after the Civil War, the last two vestiges of it, the state militia vanishing in 1905 and the Merchant Marine after it became just a government subsidy for a few big GOP contributors.

But, if we had a well regulated militia today, we would have ...

• A tremendous variety of "Light Guard" regiments with every sort of combat or civic action expertise and linguistic abilities imaginable. These regiments would have ("Young") training and ("Old") reserve battalions constituting a "Home Guard" ideal for hardening our society against terrorists without suspending or deforming our Constitution.

• Such regiments would also have both cadre and at least one ("Ready") battalion that could rapidly, in some cases instantly, be integrated into regular brigades or flotillas with far more depth and specialization than anything we can now deploy at home or abroad. Calling up the Guard would take the exercise of Presidential responsibility immediately, a Declaration of War by the Congress in good time, and careful attention to who, today, issues Letters of Marque and Reprisal to private contractors at all times. These are, however, responsibilities that nobody in either party up to.
• Additionally, instead of huge and costly stockpiles of obsolete, useless, or poorly maintained surplus, we could have an entire spectrum of ordnance, transport, signals, medicine, and other technical or engineering resources efficiently derived from our modern civilian economy, not from a corrupt and ridiculously obsolete pork-barrel. The key to that is a patriotic military today, where there are only toxic legacies of bi-partisan concession-tending.
• Finally, we could have a universal franchise that allows reliably authenticated citizens to vote securely and with dignity, regardless of property qualifications or clerical intimidation, racial or otherwise were we to predicate the right to vote on a national obligation rather than on a “credit score” calculated by a defense contractor masquerading as a credit bureau.

Such “republican restoration”, rather than “reactionary liberal” policies would seem to me, a loyal Democrat, entirely consistent with my party's best traditions, military-economic and geo-technical realities today, as well as, … the U.S. Constitution.

But, I might as well be "Whistlin' Dixie" as to even suggest anything as reactionary as constitutional armed forces or as progressive as a universal franchise.

John Robert BEHRMAN
Delegation Chair, Pct 39
Harris County, Texas