Re: Anti-Recruitment or Anti-Draft? (was Re: [Marxism] Re: Doesanybodyfeel a draft? I don't)

["Carlos A. Rivera" <cerejota@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "David McDonald" <dbmcdonald@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition"
<marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2005 11:08 PM
Subject: RE: Anti-Recruitment or Anti-Draft? (was Re: [Marxism] Re:
Doesanybodyfeel a draft? I don't)


> I have posted three or four times about the counter-recruitment movement
> emerging among the youth right now. Carlos, you have never to my knowledge
> commented on any aspect of this until your last post,

I was defending Joaquin's comments on the "draft not being on the air".

> I assumed that you weren't interested.

Now, when you assume you make an ass out of you an me. Yet, lets be honest,
assumptions

> Sorry about that. I should have said that I recall nothing in what you
> wrote
> that displays interest in the emerging counter-recruitment movement.

Which is the same bullshit. Since when is omission, in particular when
discussing something else (the Draft and recruitment are related but are two
quite distinct things), can be taken as "proof" of anything? I take your
total lack of even the basics of logic in this argument to mean you are
still being dishonest.

As to emerging counter-recruitment efforts, well, emerging for liberals and
ivy leaguers, but in all justice people like R&R and even the ISO were doing
anti-recruitment work before 9-11. So its emerging only if you are a
clueless, disconected person. It is *growing* as a function of a bunch of
priviledged kids not wanting to go to war, but it is not emerging. It was
there, and it will still be there long after all those people graduate
college and start voting Republican from their suburban homes.

> >
> OK, Carlos, check that out in October. Meanwhile, the youth are up in arms
> about counter-recruitment and doing something about it, and that's what
> interests me.

Fine, and it interests me too. Yet, this has nothing to do with the price of
beer, reagrding the specific question that if a draft will come or not.


> Carlos:
>
> Now, even in peacetime and with high recruitment, senior military
> personnel
> will bitch and whine about their lack of manpower, their needs for more
> divisions and brigades, their need for more exposure to high schoolers,
> and
> the re-installation of the draft.
>
> David:
>
> But it's NOT peacetime, it's war time.

When did you discover that?

>  I have not seen ANY whining about
> "their lack of manpower"

This is so not true. Even you have the gall of quoting Gen. Eric K.
Shinseki, not only out of context, but contradicting the above statement.

When Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, then the Chief of Staff of the Army, spoke to
congress, he was expressing the consensus of the military that the invasion
in Iraq would require more troops than those being budgeted.

Lets put it in context. In his first speech, when taking over as CoS he
said:

"Today, our heavy forces are too heavy and our light forces lack staying
power. We will address those mismatches. Heavy forces must be more
strategically deployable and more agile with a smaller logistical footprint,
and light forces must be more lethal, survivable, and tactically mobile."

This set the tone for his entire tenure. He is an RMA guy, not a neo-con
like Wolfowitz. He is an strategic thinker who crunches tactical numbers,
not an ideologue. He is centered on military questions from a
self-preserving point of view: he cares not what the military is used for
but what it is used for. This is Shinseki in brief.

The testimony he offered to Congress happened not during a political hearing
on when or if to go to war to Iraq, but on a budgetary hearing in which he
was trying to get money for the Army. He was informed by this priority.

When he left the military, he told CNN:

"I just think we mis-estimated it [Iraq occupation], and I think the sooner
we come to that realization and set ourselves up for the long term, the
better off we will be,"

Amd he doesn't mean setting up a draft, but "Heavy forces must be more
strategically deployable and more agile with a smaller logistical footprint,
and light forces must be more lethal, survivable, and tactically mobile."

BTW, he was, ta-da, bitching in peacetime about needing more troops!!! WHICH
IS EXACTLY WHAT I SAID!!! WOW!!!

> Moreover, Bush has avoided
> commenting on the level of forces in Iraq relative to the tasks by saying
> publicly that force levels in Iraq are up to the military to determine,
> while he and the other civilians have the job of providing the military
> whatever they need. He is therefore, in my opinion, somewhat vulnerable if
> the military steps up (from my point of view) or initiates (from Carlos')
> a
> discussion of inadequate force levels or the inability to maintain current
> levels.

I have never said that the military is not bitching about needing more
troops. I have said that such bitching is insignificant higher when compared
to peacetime levels.

Let me do the "for Dummies" version:

1) The military always bitches about needing more troops.

2) The military leaderhsip, in general terms, opposes the draft.

3) Bush's argument is actually a warning: "be careful what  you wish for".
In other words, "stop pressuring me for more money, or I will imposse the
draft, which you don't want me to do".

4) Hence, in order to determine if the draft can be felt, to use Joaquin's
formulation, we have to see something that breaks those 3 points, like major
military leaders asking for a draft. None of the military leaders have said
is impossible to continue at current levels. They just want more money.

That they have in fact said no, on the record, when asked about the draft,
means just that, the consensus in the military leadership is that the
*ECONOMIC* draft has to be upped (ie more budget for flashy campaings, more
access to schools, more access to colleges, a renewed "Solomon Ammendment"
type of blackmail for educational institutions that dont cooperate etc etc
etc) and that what I call the "internal draft", "stop loss", arbitrary
service extensions, etc etc etc, have to be given Congressional and
Presidential backing (something the politicians are not willing to take the
hit for, as it is an extremely unpopular measure).

So there you have, "for dummies". I don't think the draft is even on the
drawing books. Yet I think the Military is seeking to up the ante on the
economic draft *and* (most important of all) "stop loss".

Now, as I say everytime the draft is mentioned, if a political desicion is
made to invade and occupy Syria, then the draft will be inevitable. There
are not enough troops to do that, period. But the USA has plenty of troops
to do harrasment operations, and even Afghanistan style semi-occupation not
only in Syria, but in Iran and probably North Korea, at the same time.

Since this is after a list about Marxism, and not about the anti-war
movement in all its hetereogenity, let me do another "for Dummies":

1) Universal conscription is Marxist othodoxy. The draft as practiced in the
USA was not universal conscription, yet the reason Marxists have opposed it
had more to do with practical, political, questions, than with theoretical
ones. Unfortunatelly, the tactical orientation, born out of the Cold and
Vietnam War, has become a diffuse theoretical one, infused with a lot of
liberal pacifism and other bs like that.

2) The reasons for this orthodoxy, within capitalism, are listed in various
MEL text, the most relevant ones I recently posted here.

3) The core point is that Universal Conscription places weapons and military
training in the hands of the working class, which takes care of the
revolutionary need to arm the working class. Such a reality is not lost on
the bosses, which is why Universal Conscription is a very very very rare
thing. A draft is quite a different animal from UC, BTW.

4) The bourgeoise *fears* UC, and their worst fears were exposed even under
the draft system, when in Vietnam an estimated 25% of the officiers who
died, died in the hands of their own troops, murdered (ie, not under
"friendly fire" confussion).

5) The liberal CW is that the Military loves the draft and conscription.
This might be true of one officier or the other. But the reality is that the
military FEARS conscription and even the draft. They remember the "bulging
sack of shit" the institution they love became during Vietnam, and how
"clean" it has become under the current regime. Almost all of the post-WWII
military victories the USA has had are a result of the "professional" army,
not of the Draft, and its two very major defeats, the Korean and Vietnam war
are a result of a draftee army. Draftee armies are excellent for defense,
suck at offense. The military on the other hand, likes the economic draft,
and misses the fact that facing a protacted conflict, an economic draft is
almost as bad as a lottery one.

So the Marxist orientation towards the military is one based on a keen
theoretical understanding of the positive role universal conscription plays,
and a tactical opposition and denial of recruits in the mean time. It is a
dialectical view. Liberals, who oppose all conscription from a vaguely
pacifist point of view, want to "oppose the draft" even when it is a
non-issue, creating an ultra-left slogan, but from the right.

> What will absolutely galvanize the military leadership is any sense that
> they are going to "lose" the army in Iraq for whatever reasons, as they
> began to in Vietnam, when some soldiers just flat began disobeying orders
> to
> engage the enemy and a few tossed grenades into the tents of officers who
> didn't get the point. From this point of view, force cohesion, trouble
> with
> retention is, as Carlos points out, potentially very bad news. Just giving
> up on the army as a career and getting out is one thing, but going into
> opposition to the war publicly is quite another.

In this we agree. Yet again, nothing about the draft. Opposing recruitment,
and agitating troops are things that are independent from opposing a draft,
in particular because both are real and the draft is imagined.

> IVAW is a pretty big deal, in my estimation.

It is a key deal. One of the pillars to be built if we are to defeat this
war. We should all send 10 bucks a month for them. Thats 5,000 if 500 of us
do so, 60k a year. Pays for an office.

> Like the young people fighting
> against the recruiters, they are a new phenomenon borne out of the current
> struggle against the war in Iraq, unlike, fortunately, many of us who
> harken
> way way back. They are not part of the warmed-over stew left from the
> 60's,
> 70's, 80's and 90's, but authentic forces brought into motion by this
> struggle. That is my point.

I don't understand this point. Of course a new struggle will bring forth new
forces. This is an axiom of social movements.

Yet if your point is that the movement is "spontaneous" then your point is
wrong.

The IVAW owes A LOT to GWVAW, Veterans for Peace and VVAW. When I say a lot,
I mean that the IVAW was initiated by a convergence of those groups actively
seeking to organize IVs and IVs looking to get organized by those groups. As
we say in "leftist trainspotters" spottingly the IVAW was initiated by a
joint VFP/VVAW effort. I am not sure, but I think MFSO had also something to
do.

Similary, the current anti-recruitment efforts are not spontaneous events
born out of "young people" doing whatever, but out of the existense of many
organizations who for years have been agitating and doing basework against
recruitment. The CAWN was built upon pre-911 efforts, for example (including
the anti-sweatshop movement). The war simply gives a material basis for this
organizing and hence the upsurge. But such anarcho-spontex views are not
real. And I am talking in the USA.

In Puerto Rico, in early 2001, we had 80% of the parents polled opposing
military recruiters in high schools. And we are talking a country were the
vast majority are pro-US. Ironically, the percentage actually went a bit
down after 9-11, only to bounce back when they tried to enforce the Solomon
ammendment. We were on anti-war mode way before Bush got elected.

sks


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