Everyone needs a paycheck, and joining the US military as a private in "peace time" is much less morally consequential than, for instance, cooking up more destructive weapons than ever at a university or corporate lab, lobbying the US government to veto an agreement that would allow poor nations to buy generic medicines to fight AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, and other diseases, creating mass unemployment to squelch working-class rebellions, etc. (I put the words "peace time" between quotation marks because the US government has never been fully at peace with all the nations in the world at least since WW2, even when it is not explicitly at war with one and not mobilizing troops on a large scale).
It's neither necessary nor desirable for leftists to demand that all be pacifists unfailingly and refuse to join the military anywhere, any time. One of the main points of calling on both US soldiers and civilians (as well as their allied soldiers and civilians) to refuse all unlawful orders to wage war on Iraq is to highlight the illegality and immorality of the preventive war of aggression, conquest, and colonization that the USG is about to launch, _even_ by the standards of liberal democracy under capitalism. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>