Trial Balloon

The Bush administration launched a trial balloon this week. Bush's war adviser, Army Lt. General Douglas Lute, was asked about a return to a military draft on NPR's August 10 edition of All Things Considered. Lute responded that "it makes sense to certainly consider it", and that the draft "has always been an option on the table". The current size of the military is apparently not sufficient to fight the war in Iran that Dick Cheney and his warmongering allies in the media are presently building the case for (just as they did in 2002 before the invasion of Iraq).

The prolonged conflict in Iraq is already straining our military. In December 2006, Colin Powell told CBS News' Face the Nation, "The current active army is not large enough...for the kinds of missions they're being asked to perform". Earlier this year, active-duty Army troops had their deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan extended from 12 months to 15 months in order to increase the number of troops in Iraq for the "surge". Many troops have served multiple tours and when in Iraq often serve months on end with no time away from the front lines.

As it is, the Bush administration would not be able to wage the war in Iraq if it did not rely on an army of private contractors that outnumbers the troops in Iraq. For perspective, contractors were 5 percent of the total force deployed during World War II and Korea, and the percentage doubled to 10 percent during Vietnam and the first Gulf War.

Wars that should not be fought, cannot be fought without conscription (or at least huge numbers of private contractors as noted above). Involuntary service is antithetical to the American notion of freedom and all attempts at instituting a draft were rejected by the American people until World War I. Americans would riot in the streets if the government determined it necessary to confiscate our television sets for use by government to fight a war. Hopefully we would express the same moral outrage over the confiscation of the lives of our young men.

The 13th Amendment to the Constitution seems clear on the subject to most Americans (excluding politicians and the Supreme Court). It says, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Ron Paul summarized it well in his book Freedom Under Siege, "Conscription contradicts the whole concept of natural rights. If our lives and liberties are gifts of the Creator, as our Founding Fathers believed, the use of our lives should never be controlled by the State. If they are controlled, it supports the totalitarian notion that rights are mere privileges granted by the State and, therefore, removable at will by the state, an idea alien to the American tradition".

Hopefully, General Lute's statement will go down like a lead balloon.