Reply #56: Her Iraq position makes me sick. But she's partly correct. [View All]

[Voltaire99]

Here are my premises.

1) Our volunteer army is staffed by the economically marginalized and outright downtrodden.
2) That's unfair. Wal-Mart America shouldn't have to defend Neiman Marcus America.
3) We need to debate how the nation's military is staffed.

Now, whatever her other merits, Hillary is hardly to be trusted on matters of war. She's already blown it on Iraq, which she enthusiastically supported (look up her comments in advance of the vote; she was for giving Bush the OK to take any action he deemed necessary). Indeed, her views on the Middle East are scarcely more nuanced than those of Perle or Wolfowitz, with whom she could easily take tea.

But funnily enough, she is right to question who will fight our future imperial wars. The honest answer is easy: the only fair way to staff the military in an era of supposed lethal peril is to expose everyone of draft age to equal risk of conscription. In fact, it's probably disingenuous to oppose our current vile war while opposing a draft, because the absence of a draft condemns the economically depressed to keep fighting it and helps dampen broad popular opposition. It's always easier to slap a "support our troops" sticker on the SUV when "our troops" are people you never see or meet!

Better if the risk of draft fills the air, and the resulting youth and bourgeois outrage forces our politicians to rethink the current overseas adventure. This might be the surest way to pry us out of Iraq. When the richer neighborhoods awake one day to find Fox News solemnly explaining that the disposable poor no longer have to do the dying alone, America is sure to discover a newfound conscience about barging into other people's nations.

Bring that moment to pass, and Hillary will get her debate, all right.