Bush’s
War Czar Floats Call For Military Draft
By Bill Van Auken
15 August, 2007
WSWS.org
The
senior military officer tapped by President Bush to serve as his “war
czar” declared in a radio interview last Friday that Washington
should consider the reimposition of a military draft to relieve the
extreme pressure that the ongoing wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan
are inflicting on the US military.
“I think it makes sense
to certainly consider it,” Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in an interview
with National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”
The general continued: “And
I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table. But ultimately,
this is a policy matter between meeting the demands for the nation’s
security by one means or another.”
The interview, the first
given by Lute since he was confirmed by the Senate in June, had all
the earmarks of a trial balloon aimed at introducing the idea of once
again conscripting young people into the armed forces for America’s
colonial-style wars under conditions in which extended back-to-back
combat deployments are steadily wearing down the US military.
Lute, an active duty general,
was confirmed by the US Senate last June to a position that amounts
to a sort of liaison between the White House, the military and other
civilian agencies involved in the Iraq occupation. At least five prominent
retired officers had rejected the post, some openly stating that they
considered any attempt to rescue the Iraqi intervention as hopeless.
Lute had reportedly long been a critic of the administration’s
handling of the war from the standpoint of the strains that it has placed
on the American military.
The suggestion that military
conscription should be reinstated for the first time since President
Richard Nixon suspended the draft 34 years ago under conditions of massive
opposition to the war in Vietnam clearly is a political bombshell. Lute
hastened to qualify his remarks, acknowledging that the action would
represent a “major policy shift” and reaffirming the line
generally given by both the Bush administration and the Pentagon, declaring,
“Today, the current means of the all-volunteer force is serving
us exceptionally well.”
White House and Pentagon
spokesmen rushed to deny that Lute’s comments were connected to
any plans for reviving the draft.
“The president’s
position is that the all-volunteer military meets the needs of the country
and there is no discussion of a draft. Gen. Lute made that point as
well,” said National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan
Whitman chimed in, “I can tell you emphatically that there is
absolutely no consideration being given to reinstituting the draft.”
He added, “The all-volunteer force has surpassed all expectations
of its founders.”
There is undoubtedly extreme
reluctance within both the US military and the ruling elite as a whole
to bringing back the draft under the present political conditions, in
which a decisive majority of the American population opposes the continued
deployment of US troops in Iraq. Not only is there the general fear
that conscription would incite a political explosion, but within the
military brass—most of which is drawn from veterans of America’s
ill-fated war in Vietnam—there is deep-seated concern that an
army of conscripts in Iraq could enter into the same kind of crisis,
decomposition and, in some cases, open revolt that was seen among US
troops in Southeast Asia 35 years ago.
But there exists an inescapable
logic to the reemergence of the draft as a serious subject of policy
debate in Washington, even as popular hostility to the war has grown
to unprecedented levels, seemingly making conscription politically unthinkable.
On the military side, there
are increasing warnings from the top uniformed ranks that the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars are “breaking” the army, steadily eroding
its most qualified personnel, bringing in recruits that would have been
rejected in earlier years and who are inadequately trained, and leaving
too few units to maintain these occupations, much less to conduct interventions
elsewhere.
Lute referred to the strains
placed on the troops. “There’s both a personal dimension
of this, where this kind of stress plays out across dinner tables and
in living room conversations within these families,” he said.
“And ultimately, the health of the all-volunteer force is going
to rest on those sorts of personal family decisions.”
The back-to-back deployments
and the curtailing of “dwell time,” in which troops are
meant to recuperate from combat duty, retrain and reequip, have wreaked
havoc on soldiers’ personal lives, with divorce, suicide and alcoholism
rates all up sharply.
Meanwhile, one third of those
returning from Afghanistan and Iraq to be treated at government facilities
have been diagnosed with mental illness. According to the Pentagon’s
own mental health taskforce, the protracted deployments of US troops—considerably
longer than combat tours served by soldiers in either Vietnam or World
War II—have resulted in 38 percent of regular army soldiers, 31
percent of marines and 49 percent of National Guard troops showing symptoms
of post-traumatic stress disorder within three months of returning from
Iraq.
At the same time, the extreme
unpopularity of the war has generated a deepening recruitment crisis
for the US military. The Army was able to meet its July recruitment
goal only by adding a $20,000 sign-up bonus. The incentive, combined
with a significant beefing up of the recruiters’ ranks, came after
two straight months of enlistment shortfalls, with recruiters missing
their target by 15 percent in June.
The military has also been
forced to drop its recruitment standards. In 2006, for example, just
73 percent of army recruits were high school graduates, compared to
over 90 percent two years earlier. At the same time, it has increased
the number of so-called waivers for recruits with criminal convictions
that would otherwise keep them out of the army by 65 percent since the
beginning of the war and has also raised the maximum enlistment age
to 42.
The depth of the crisis confronting
the US military—and the inability of these stopgap measures to
resolve a systemic crisis—was spelled out late last month in Congressional
testimony by Lawrence Korb, who served as assistant secretary of defense
in charge of manpower from 1981 through 1985 under the Reagan administration.
“The decision to escalate
or to ‘surge’ five more brigades and a total of 30,000 more
ground troops into Iraq has put additional strain on the ground forces
and threatens to leave the United States with a broken force that is
unprepared to deal with other threats around the world,” Korb
told Congress.
“The simple fact is
that the United States currently does not have enough troops who are
ready and available for potential contingency missions in places like
Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, or anywhere else,” he said.
He charged that the administration’s
order to extend tours in Iraq and Afghanistan from 12 to 15 months—which
he pointed out had not been done even during the Vietnam and Korean
wars—as well as the reduction in training given to those sent
into combat was placing “unreasonable stress” on American
forces.
Korb’s experience as
the Pentagon official responsible for troop levels lends substantial
weight to his remarks—which included his own assertion that a
revived draft is required.
He argued that the present
deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan represent “a complete misuse
of the all-volunteer military.”
This volunteer force, he
said, “was designed to act as an initial response force, a force
that would be able to repel and counter aggression. If America ever
found itself in a protracted ground war, or was forced to act against
an existential threat, the all-volunteer force was to act as a bridge
to re-instating conscription. This is why we require young men to register
when they turn 18.”
Citing the statement made
last fall by Gen. John Abizaid, the former head of the US Central Command,
that the all-volunteer military was not “built to sustain a long
war,” Korb continued: “Therefore, if the United States is
going to have a significant component of its ground forces in Iraq over
the next five, 10, 15, or 30 years, then the only correct course is
for the president and those supporting this open-ended and escalated
presence in Iraq to call for re-instating the draft. That would be the
responsible path.”
Korb hastened to make clear
that he did not support such an option, but instead believed that the
US should conduct a “strategic redeployment,” withdrawing
US forces from Iraq over the next 10 to 12 months.
While there is no doubt that
the overwhelming majority of the American population supports such a
withdrawal, there are increasing indications that no section of the
American ruling elite or the leaderships of the two major political
parties is contemplating a withdrawal from Iraq.
The latest indication of
the real position prevailing in the political establishment came in
an editorial published Monday by the New York Times, the erstwhile voice
of American liberalism. Entitled “Wrong Way Out of Iraq,”
the editorial used the British government’s decision to pull out
all but 5,000 of its 30,000 troops presently deployed in Iraq and restation
the remaining units at a relatively secure airbase outside of Basra
as an example of what the US should not do.
The Times notes that the
option chosen by the British government “follows the script some
Americans now advocate for American forces in Iraq: reduce the numbers—and
urban exposure—but still maintain a significant presence for the
next several years.”
For “some Americans,”
the Times editors could more accurately have substituted every leading
candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. The Democratic
frontrunners—Senators Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards
and others—have all made it clear that they would maintain a scaled-down
deployment of US troops in Iraq indefinitely for the purposes of “counterterrorism”
operations and protecting US strategic interests; i.e., suppressing
Iraqi resistance and assuring control of Iraq’s oil wealth by
American-based energy conglomerates.
The Times editorial goes
on to cite the disintegrating security situation in Basra, where the
British have overseen the occupation for the past four years, declaring
that the lesson is that “going partway is not a realistic option.”
The editorial concludes:
“The United States cannot walk away from the new international
terrorist front it created in Iraq. It will need to keep sufficient
forces and staging points in the region to strike effectively against
terrorist sanctuaries there or a Qaeda bid to hijack control of a strife-torn
Iraq... there should be no illusions about trying to continue the war
on a reduced scale. It is folly to expect a smaller American force to
do in a short time what a much larger force could not do over a very
long time.”
What clearly is envisioned
here is a large scale military occupation of Iraq for many years to
come, precisely the situation that the senior uniformed commanders and
military analysts insist requires conscription to adequately sustain.
Whatever their criticisms
of the Bush administration’s “mismanagement” of the
war in Iraq, the Democratic leadership remains committed to the original
goals for which this war was launched—establishing US hegemony
over the oil rich Persian Gulf as a means of securing a strategic advantage
over Washington’s economic rivals in Europe and Asia. In this
context, the war is not an aberration, but part of a global struggle
which poses still more such interventions—in Iran, Venezuela or
in other areas of the globe—for which still more young Americans
will be needed as cannon fodder.
This is the objective context
that gave rise to Lute’s remarks, which reflect a far more extensive
discussion on military conscription that is unfolding behind the backs
of the American people.
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