A Modest Proposal — For the Draft

Christ Jules, I thought you was talkin’ about beer.

Calls for a draft are being revived. Here’s anti-war author Frank Schaeffer at the Huffington Post. Here’s the Sacramento Bee’s public editor, fielding readers’ calls for a draft. Here’s Aileen Morey at NPR’s “This I Believe.”

The argument can be summed up simply. Only a small percentage of Americans are carrying the burden of the war. This is unfair. More to the point, it has been impossible to get parents and college kids to give more than a passing damn about the war.

The calls for a military draft are in fact calls for forcible enlistment in the anti-war movement, which has suffered greatly from its failure to recruit in the current voluntary political involvement model. The calls for a draft are nothing more than frustrated efforts to bolster the effectively non-existent anti-war movement to Vietnam levels by swelling its ranks with suddenly concerned suburban Americans.

Jules Crittenden/Pajamas Media