First They Came for the Nurses; First the Back-Door Draft; Now the Foot-in-the-Door Draft
By DAVE LINDORFF
So the cat's out of the bag. With reports today in the New York Times, AP and other media outlets that the Pentagon is contemplating a draft call-up of health professionals because of a shortage of doctors, nurses and medics in the increasingly thinly stretched U.S. military, we can see the lie in Bush's (and in Kerry's) promises not to reinstate conscription.
Everyone agrees that with the war in Iraq going badly, and with little prospect of it getting easier for the U.S. forces over there, and with the president making threats against Iran and Syria, not to mention North Korea, that the military is extended way too far. Already we have the "back-door" draft of reservists and National Guard troops, who have been forced to do double hitches in Iraq, and we have "stop-loss" orders that bar some troops--regular and reserve--from leaving the military when their enlistments are up.
You can't go much further there, and recruitment and reenlistment targets are no longer being met. To paraphrase a younger and nobler John Kerry, "Who wants to be the next man to sign up and risk dying for a lost cause?"
The main argument that has been put forward by the punditry (and Bush apologists, which is often the same thing in today's media), against the likelihood of a return of the draft is that it would be politically unacceptable. After all, they say, before you can have a draft call-up, you have to have a conscription bill passed by both houses of Congress, and signed by the president.
And so it would seem, but the clever minds in the Bush administration have found a way around this.
They'll call up docs and nurses.
Who in Congress, or the media, or even among much of the public, is going to argue if the administration next January announces that there is a critical shortage of doctors and nurses in Iraq, and that our noble soldiers are at risk of death or permanent injury because of inadequate emergency medical services near the front?
Yet to call up those medical personnel, first that draft authorization legislation would have to be passed by Congress and signed into law by the president.
Obviously, such a bill would be presented as "just" a measure so that medical personnel could be required to serve, but of course, a draft bill is a draft bill. Maybe at first the Pentagon would only ask for a certain category of skills in a limited call-up, but the bill itself would be passed into law. The decision on who to call next would be an administrative, not a political, decision, to be made by the generals and the folks at the Selective Service System.
We could expect to see a general call-up preceeded by a few more special category call-ups--maybe mechanics, electronics experts, pilots, etc.--always with an explanation that this was just a limited shortage. This draft "creep" will eventually lead to a full-scale draft.
And the members of Congress who voted for the authorization would be able to say they had only intended it to be for medical help.
As someone who fought against the draft for years during the Indochina War (I had an 81 in the lottery and never took a deferment, but was improperly rejected with a 4F after raising a fuss at my pre-induction physical in 1969), I have to say that maybe this would not be such a bad thing. I'm inclined to agree with Korean War veteran Congressman Charles Rangel, who had a bill in the House to restore the draft until House Republicans killed the measure earlier this month. A draft--especially a fair one that drafts the sons of the rich as well as the sons of the working class--makes it much harder for the government to fight unjust and unnecessary wars.
As Col. David Hackworth (http://www.hackworth.com) has said, draftees make great soldiers when they believe in the cause.
The thing is, when they don't, they tend to get uppity about being put in harm's way, and don't have to worry about their complaining and lack of submissiveness getting in the way of their career paths.
Back in the late '60s and early 1970s, many draftees in Nam were in virtual open rebellion against military authorities--part of the reason the U.S. lost the war in Indochina. The latest brouhaha in Iraq in which a whole unit of reservists refused orders to make what they called a "suicide run" delivering fuel to a remote base with poor and unprotected equipment, is a sign that the "back-door" draftees of the reserve and Guard are starting to do the same thing in this latest quagmire.
Meanwhile, back home, voters and reporters should be asking both Bush and Kerry much more specific questions about the draft and its possible return during the term of the next president, whomever that may be.
Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by Lindorff can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.
He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.com
website http://www.thiscantbehappening.net
originally published on counterpunch
