How to end the wars

It has been said that all politics is local. That means what affects your life is what you’re most interested in and pay attention to. For example, if you’re retired, you pay a lot of attention to the politicians talking about modifying Social Security and trying to turn it into Social Insecurity. If you’re 25 though, you’re probably more interested in nightlife than what’s going on in Washington and how our politicians are selling themselves to the highest bidders, believing that the future will take care of itself. It won’t.

When I was growing up in England, I used to read my father’s Newsweek subscription. Every week there were articles about the Vietnam War. I could never understand what America was doing in Vietnam, but thought, naively, that the US government had a clue. They didn’t.

Back in the day, a TV commercial coined my thoughts. It was an ad for vegetables using a cartoon character was the Jolly Green Giant, now known as the Green Giant. As you can see from this YouTube video, the giant was big and strong, but somehow lacking in intelligence… in a word dumb. That’s how I thought of the United States government… big, immensely strong, naive, but dumb. Why dumb? Our government doesn’t know what good judgement is, but depends on sheer strength to blunder through life.

I still think that.

So what was different between the Vietnam War and our current round of fiascoes? Selective Service and The Draft. The public’s children were drafted, trained in the Army, sent to Vietnam and many died or were maimed. The parents (and the draftees) didn’t like that one bit so they were very vocal in opposition.

If you lived in the 60’s you are keenly aware of the huge number of demonstrations against the war and how risky it was for the politicians of the day to support it. Even President Johnson (“Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?”) admitted on recordings that Vietnam was lost years before the war ended with our defeat, but couldn’t end it because of political considerations.

Of the very few things that President George W. Bush did that could be considered smart, was not to reconstitute The Draft. So the only kids who went to war were the volunteers. And as they were such a small percentage of the population, the general public didn’t really care as their kids weren’t going to die for their administration country.

The general public was quite happy to support the troops by attaching ribbon decals and “I support the troops” bumper stickers on their cars but nothing else. They were Patriots and the ribbons and bumper stickers proved it.

If The Draft was reinstated and you son and daughter was handed an M16, I suspect that the malaise and complacency about our perpetual wars would end swiftly. A much larger percentage of the population would be at risk, and the parents and unwilling cannon fodder draftees would be so noisy that sure-thing politicians would risk not being reelected. All Politics is very much local when your child is at risk of being blown up or shot in the Middle East. That tends to get a parent’s attention.

Perhaps, if the law changed so that congress-people’s children were obliged be drafted (not a chance), and sent to the most perilous bases in war zones, and not the cushy safe jobs, that they wouldn’t so quick to send other people’s children off to war.

As wars tend to be political and business (oil related) indulgences, the risks to the politician’s careers would be so great that far fewer would support new wars. The old ones, like our failed Afghanistan folly, would end very, very quickly.

It can’t end too fast. So if The Draft were activated again, wars would end fast. I support The Draft, for both men and women.