To Stop US Militarism and Criminal Wars, We Need Universal Conscription

Driving home from my coffee at the local food co-op in a suburb just north of Philadelphia, I passed by the gas station at the local 7-ll store. Now owned by a Japanese company, 7-11 is one of the largest gas chains in the US.

I found myself thinking how back in the early years of this century, when Venezuela was headed by the hugely popular radical leftist President Hugo Chavez, a brash and charismatic former junior officer in the Venezuelan Army who was elected and re-elected four times to lead the county. Some Americans boycotted the chain’s petrol pumps because they used gas from Citgo, a company majority owned by Venezuela. Others like myself, began only filling my car’s tank at 7-11s even if a cheaper gas station was across the street, The reason for both groups’ decisions was that Chavez, a leftist nationalist who nationalized the country’s long US-owned oil companies, and who had been briefly captured in a US-backed but short-lived military coup in 2002, had in 2006 denounced then former president and one-time CIA director George H. W. Bush at the United Nations General Assembly, saying, “Yesterday, the devil came here. Right here. Right here. And it smells of sulfur still today, this table that I am now standing in front of.” He followed by making a sign of the cross and then looking up at the ceiling, his hands held together in prayer.”

Chavez had good reason for denouncing Bush, as in 2002 a military coup backed by the CIA and the US government had taken him captive, holding him at a Venezuelan military base, only to release him when a mass movement of ordinary Venezuelans spontaneously poured into the streets along with many enlisted soldiers all demanding his release and return to the presidential palace.

Both right-wing Republicans and leftists like myself had reasons for making our competing points of view using our wallets.

I’m reminded of that time because at least many Americans were paying attention back then to what the US government was doing in our names in other parts of the world.

These days, not so much.

Today, fully half of this country’s military aircraft fleet and 41 percent of available in the US Navy are stationed in and around Iran, which is being bombed and struck by missiles by the US and its US ally Israel. More bombs are were likely dropped on that country of 92 million by just one of the B-52 strategic bombers being used for this unprecedented onslaught than all the explosives expended by both sides during the entire  11 years of the the US Revolutionary War.

Yet wherever I go, in the supermarket, at the Post Office, in Home Depot — even in the food co-op! —there is little evidence that the US is at war with Iran, or even much awareness that it is a war that was launched by the US and Israel (which, because of the US’s provision of $4 billion a year of free weapons, is such a subsidiary of the Pentagon it might as well have an annex there).

In some ways the lack of discourse in the aisles or on the street, the seeming normalcy of the neighborhoods I driver through, which display the vista of a total absence of yard signs denouncing war or calling for peace, resembling the decade of likewise ignored US  war on Iraq and Afghanistan.

The US war Vietnam was different.  Nearly all people or families and communities then were personally impacted by it, especially by 1965, when I was 16, there was conscription, and the number of US troops fighting in that country, and the number of them coming home in body bags to ciies, towns and villages all across the nation was rising. Whether it was young men facing being drafted, or if they had college deferments, their friends who didn’t, their parents, the young wives or girl friends of those drafted or at risk of being drafted, that war was  never long out of people’s minds.

President Nixon realized the price he was paying in his popularity for the continuing draft and so, also faced with impeachment and possible conviction for war and election crimes, he ended it in 1973.

A draft resister since I turned 18 in 1967, when I committed myself to refusing military service or even “alternative service,” I was elated by the end to conscription at the time as was most of the anti-war movement, But as I look at the passivity of most of this country’s population during this current conflict—a military action in which the US  is the aggressor—I’m rethinking my position.

If, with the White House in the hands of a psychopath who cannot even admit to being to blame as Commander in Chief for a targeted missile strike in the first minutes of his war which flattened a girls’ elementary school, killing 200 people, including teachers and young girls aged 7-12, we aren’t seeing millions of people piling into the streets to demand a halt, I think we really need to return to a military composed primarily of conscripts. Every American family needs to have a personal stake (for the health and safety of their children) in US foreign policy, and because the trillion-dollar-a-year military budget has such a huge impact on social spending in the US), in domestic policy, too.

The Trump White House is refusing to rule out a draft, and also won’t rule out sending current all-volunteer troops into Iran, and look at the hue and cry that has arisen from the likes of former Trump backer Rep.Margery Taylor Greene:  “Not my son! Over my dead body!!!!”  With conscription, most mothers and fathers would be saying the same thing.

As long as the only thing angering Americans about Trump’s war crime of launching an illegal war of aggression against Iran is the rising cost of oil, we need to make it clear that the cost of war is paid no for oil but in blood.

Only a universal draft can do that.