Another Provocative Idea For Tuesday

It is one of the most remarkable things about people of roughly my age group having raised cynicism to a virtual virtue that we had probably the most cynical president of modern history as an example of what a moral wasteland that attitude produced.

One of the most truly evil masterstrokes of the cynical genius, Richard Nixon, was to gut the anti-war movement of much of its power by localizing the danger of being drafted for the war in Vietnam-Southeast Asia by instituting the draft lottery.  He knew that while the danger of being drafted hung over a large percentage of the young male population, the size of the resistance would be proportionally large and motivated.  Once a large percentage of that potential resistance was let off the hook, the motivation to put their time, effort and bodies into that resistance would peter out.  If you weren't so unlucky as to get a high number in the lottery, you were free to pursue other interests.  So we had the dreadful popular culture of the 1970s and the wars continued until after Nixon was forced to resign for other reasons, the congress being unwilling to indict him on the war crimes which were far more serious than what it chose to nail him for.

That is what I remember thinking about the relationship between the danger of getting sent to fight in an illegal war of imperial conquest and the likelihood of your being an active opponent of such wars.  The history of American wars since 2000 is a good example of how easy it is to bring interminable wars that can't be won and which shouldn't have ever been started when the American population is in no immediate danger, direct or to loved ones.

George W. Bush could never have invaded Iraq if people knew they could be drafted to fight in his illegal war sold with lies.   As it is, he was able to send an army comprising mostly sons and daughters of the underclass, and even a small percentage of them.  He was able to keep them in interminable rotation in that war, damaging them far more seriously than he would have been able to get away with if it had been a larger percentage of the population who was being sent.   The draft is, I contend, one of the greatest inhibitions to war available to us.

Update:  College deferments ended when you graduated, so being in college didn't mean you were entirely off the hook.  I knew several young men who were drafted and had to leave their teaching jobs because their college deferments ended.  And a large number of the people I knew in college were blue collar, working people who often had brothers who were not in college and so had no deferment.   But I guess you had to be in the lower economic classes to have realized that.