Oh, a draft. That would be swell.

How about you go enlist right now.

You do not achieve peace by drafting more innocents into war.

But you don't have war if the sons of the wealthy and the powerful have to fight in it. I think that was Bill's point. My own solution would be to turn the draft around. Start drafting at age 65 and work downwards as needed. The war will stop when the first congressman is called up for his physical.

If you want to get a right-winger angry, suggest that we need to resurrect the draft or slap on a tax to pay for the wars. War is never opposed by right-wingers, but ask them to bear the cost of their idiotic imperialism and they go apeshit.

I believe we need a draft that applies to everyone, male and female, rich and poor. Then let's roll back the Bush and Reagan tax cuts to pay for the wars they started. No need to cut Social Security and Medicare to blow up old people in the Afghan hills.

Whoever said that the draft for war service causes the sons of the wealthy and powerful to have to serve in wars? I never heard of that to be the case, although I came of age in the post Vietnam War era and enjoyed in my college years a sense of freedom from that kind of government service although I would have gladly served here at home. Maybe the public defender service I did do should count for something.

If a draft were enacted, it should allow those drafted to serve here at home by their own choice and should include men and women with no opportunity to escape service by finagling various special opportunities on the national guard or whatever. Let the sons of the wealthy and powerful serve as privates or serve by emptying bedpans. And require states that allow special points for veterans for special status for employment also be required to confer points to those who choose to do government service at home also being required to confer those points to those who choose to serve here at home.

Let the military compete for those draftees.

¿pɐǝɥ s,ʇı uo plɹoʍ ǝɥʇ uɹnʇ ʇou ʎɥʍ

The elite always get special treatment. That's what it means to be elite. If you think that a draft wouldn't discriminate and would put the sons of billionaires in the front lines of Afghanistan, you're dreaming.

The value of the draft is not so much that it forces the elites to serve, as admirable a goal as that may be. It's that a draft makes it much harder to hide the cost of the war from the rest of us. The public turned against Vietnam because they realized their sons and brothers and nephews and cousins and even the kid down the block were being sent off to get maimed and killed for nothing.

They're still being maimed and killed for nothing - and now it's daughters and sister and nieces and mothers as well. Luckily, we have Tiger Woods to keep us occupied.

Draft, yeah, that worked out great. Hey, I was a rear area warrior, my unit was filthy with infantry trained upper class troops. Two guys from my unit had "connections" that covered them. One's father was a major general, the other I don't remember. They kept spouting shit about what they would do if they could just get into combat. They and I went around and around constantly because I was a clear left winger.

They took off with their weapons, rumor said they went out on a mission with the Airborne troops. They came back unharmed, but they never had a positive word to say about the war after that.

Sorta like my room mate. He just wanted to go out and kill some "commies." We had the most raging argument when we moved in together that I have ever had in my life without someone getting hurt. We didn't "talk" to each other for 9 months unless we had to.

I needed a statement that I had been in combat and that I saw a Vietnamese training company massacred at less than 50 feet. I was surprised that I remembered his name, but I called and called and called. He finally answered and told me just how lucky I was because he was dying and lived in Mexico and that he came to his home to sign the final papers on the sale of his house. He didn't even know that the telephone was still on.

He filled in some big blanks for me. Then he admitted that for most of his tour that he was too ashamed to talk to me because he found out that everything that we had argued about that I was right.

I didn't tell him that I had filed a Freedom of Information Act request, as soon as the act had passed congress, for my Criminal Investigation Division files. The reporter's name was redacted and only a couple of times was the title "first lieutenant Reserve CID" not blacked out. Yeah I knew instantly why when I moved from Camp Granite to Headquarters II corp that I was housed with a sergeant E5 when I was a PFC and should have been in the open squad bay. I had thought that I was home clear on a couple of things but they were right, I did what they suspected I had done.

Forget the damn draft unless it is solely directed at the relatives of the congress people and the senate people and the military/industrial complex.

z

In fact the draft did work out pretty great. The reason there was any resistance at all was the draft. Now we have no draft, and no resistance. We've reverted to the late-stage Roman imperial model of hiring mercenaries to take what we want; we can't sacrifice our own children for such tawdry goals as we lust after.