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Thursday, October 21, 2004

Steve Gilliard Tells it Like it Is
Posted by Jill | 10:21 AM

No offense meant to my good friend Vern (whose new book, 5 On the Outside, printed on real god damn paper and with an introduction by Your Humble Blogger, is now available for all your Christmas shopping needs), but Steve Gilliard lays the cards on the table as to what anyone with a child who will be between the ages of 18 and 34 in the next four years has to look forward to:

Let me put it simply: if the draft comes back, you will not be able to hide your precious, middle class children from the military. No running to Holland, no drive to Canada. A new law might restrict the travel options of US citizens of draft age and you may well have prove you are draft exempt or ineligible to cross the frontiers. If not, anyone trying to stay in Canada may face a protracted legal struggle or immediate deportation.

So if you think you can ship the kids off to the UK, well, that's not going to work. They won't be able to support themselves, work legally and face immediate deportation to the US if arrested or detained.

The talk of a skills draft is nonsense. There will be a draft and the first people to go will be working teens out of school. Wal-Mart, Home Depot, McDonalds, all will lose those young male employees, first. They will be unprotected from the draft. And thus the first to go in the Army.

And what will they do?

Hi ho, hi ho, to Ft. Benning you will go, just like all the other 11 Bravos. Make no mistake, the draftees will get all the fun jobs like truck driver and combat infantryman. Also, changes in the force structure mean that you'll have a much harder time volunteering for the Navy, Coast Guard and Air Force. Nope, it's an 11B or 0300 (Marine Rifleman) MOS for you. And the increase will be in infantry, MP's and Engineers. All highly dangerous, all with high risk of injury and death.

Middle class people need to understand something. They will not be able to get their precious children overseas to save them. Most countries will not take our young men and even if they did, they may never come home again. Ever. They will face felony charges if they attempt to come back to the US. Nigeria? They may have their own civil war there sooner rather than later.

The draft will be targeted towards you and your kin. Everyone else joins the military. It's the white, middle class who a new draft would seek to scoop up. Those townies your kids sneer at will be long gone when the draft comes.

You middle class people (white, black, asian) have engaged in magical thinking for a very long time. It's not 1968. Canada sent more people to Vietnam than accepted as draft dodgers. They will come for your children and then make it impossible for them to escape or effectively leave them stateless abroad or facing either immediate induction or a felony charge at home.

So if you think running will solve your problems, it won't even come close.

If you want to stop a draft, you have to fight it now, here, not run, because there won't be a place to run and CO status just takes the gun from your son's hand when he's in that Infantry platoon.


To Mr. Gilliard's analysis I just have one thing to add, and that is to remind everyone of what a White House aide told Ron Suskind, as written in last week's horrifying New York Times piece on the certainty of George W. Bush:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''


In other words, the Bush Administration creates its own reality, and if it's at odds with consensus reality, so be it. So when George W. Bush states unequivocally that there will be no draft, he means it -- within the context of his own manufactured reality at the moment. This model assures, however, that when he DOES institute a draft, it will be called something else. But it will still involve YOUR kids being sent to fight for the neocons' dreams of empire.
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