Reinstatement of the Draft

I don't think this war is wrong, I do think we need some help here. The easy out is coalition forces in Afghanistan, and transfer our 15,000 (that's not a hard #) guys to Iraq.

Fear Factor Kerry is rattling Republicans by accusing Bush of a ‘back-door’ draft. A disabled Vietnam vet finds the issue is also resonating on college campuses

By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek

Updated: 4:46 p.m. ET Oct. 22, 2004

Oct. 22 - Bobby Muller was a Marine lieutenant leading an assault in Vietnam when a bullet severed his spine in April 1969. He spent almost a year recovering in a Veterans Hospital in the Bronx, where the woes of other battlefield casualties echoed his own and led him to dedicate his life to what he calls “war-related work.”

Muller cofounded Vietnam Veterans Against the War with John Kerry and is now president of Vietnam Veterans of America. He has been in a wheelchair for the last 35 years, but that hasn’t slowed him down. Indeed, it’s made him more determined to share his experience. He is currently touring college campuses to educate young people about the lessons of war in Vietnam and Iraq.

What he’s finding is growing concern about the prospect of a draft. Nobody wants a draft, he tells students. “But we’re not talking about something that is an option if the security situation we face as a nation requires it,” he says. The Pentagon is already straining to fill the ranks with call-ups of hundreds of reservists who believed they had fulfilled their military service. These are people with settled lives who have families to support; a third of them have failed to report for duty.

Just a few weeks ago, the House voted overwhelmingly against legislation calling for mandatory national service. There were only two dissenting votes. Yet the Pentagon is updating plans for a targeted draft of health-care workers should they be needed in the event of an attack on the homeland. With U.S. forces overextended in Iraq and around the world, college students are newly alert to the risk of a draft. “They were a blank page when it comes to this war,” Muller said in an interview one recent afternoon in his Washington office. “They knew Saddam was a bad guy. It wasn’t a whole lot more sophisticated than that. The fact that it’s becoming personal is new.”

The musical icons of Muller’s generation grace the walls of his office. Muller marvels that Bruce Springsteen can still do three hours of rock at age 55. The ’60s generation that once rallied around antiwar themes, Muller believes, now has another cause to rally around. “There is no practical consciousness about the Vietnam experience,” says the vet. “The idea that the U.S.—a superpower—could lose to a peasant people was unimaginable, and we lost, and what we lost was huge. [An estimated] 3 million Vietnamese dead, 58,000 Americans dead, 300,000 wounded, many, like me, disabled. We dropped two and a half times the tonnage of bombs than in World War II. And what happened at home: in 1964, 76 percent trusted our political leadership. As the war wore on and the lies eroded the government’s credibility, 10 years later, that number was 34 percent.”

George W. Bush says he opposes the draft, but he supports an adventuresome foreign policy. Where will he get the bodies to put on the front lines? John Kerry says there’s already a back-door draft through extended tours and call-ups, and he’s raised the specter of a draft should Bush win a second term. The attack rattles Republicans because it has plausibility, and it speaks to the overstretched military and the issue of national sacrifice. Bush wants to wage a perpetual war against terrorists while not demanding any sacrifice from the broader public. The soldiers are sacrificing enormously in this war while the rest of the population, particularly the wealthy, is getting off.

The draft issue is a winner for Kerry, says Marshall Wittmann, a senior scholar at the Democratic Leadership Council, who until recently was a top aide to Sen. John McCain. Wittmann regards it as the political equivalent of Vice President Dick Cheney saying that electing Kerry would invite another terrorist attack. “It’s an indication of Kerry’s willingness to hit back at Republicans in the same way,” he says. “It raises the fear factor among Republicans the same way a new terror alert unsettles Democrats. A lot of the other issues are theoretical, but a mother can look at her son and daughter and worry about the draft. It’s more concrete.”

Muller urges people to see “Fog of War,” the Oscar-winning documentary about the architect of the Vietnam War, former Defense secretary Robert McNamara. “We’ve lost this war,” McNamara told President Lyndon Johnson in 1967. “We should fundamentally rethink what we’re doing.” Yet with American prestige on the line, the political leaders managed to sustain the war over seven years. “The other thing McNamara said in that documentary is that the No. 1 tragedy is that we didn’t know the Vietnamese,” says Muller. “We don’t know about Islam, the Sunnis, the Shiites, the history of what the Europeans did in Iraq. It’s not a country; it’s an ideology we’re up against.”

Muller is white-haired now at 58, but he is pictured along with Kerry in “Going Upriver,” the new documentary about Kerry’s Vietnam experience and his leadership in the protest movement. “There was a lot of anger about him because he wasn’t more radical,” says Muller. “Remember, we were a bunch of dirt bags—longhaired and bearded. He was more presentable to the Establishment. I knew Kerry was going to run for president. Coming out of that war, it’s not surprising you dedicate yourself to political work. People died, and it was wrong.”