> 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
Nuclear weapon designers and corporate lobbyists aren't at the bottom of the solidarity schedule, they're near the top of the elimination schedule...
There is no sane reason why the US needs to have a million-man army with enough power to wipe the earth out a few hundred times over. To be an antimilitarist in these times is definitely not the same as being a secular saint out for martyrdom or an absolutist pacifist. There is a set of antimilitary arguments that ought to be made, and I think these should take precedence to sniping at troops with these largely fictitious laws. Specially, that having a big offensive army causes you to fight more wars. Why would you ever get a third of what you want through diplomacy when you can get half by storming in with the cavalry? In this sense the problem is irreducibly the presence of a large standing army; it skews the payoffs our brave leaders are faced with. To that effect, you can add the massive cost a large army has on the society which hosts it, specially in terms of its attitudes. Having heaps of tanks and guns certainly doesn't make people less belligerent.
Of course, in a parallel universe where international law isn't two jokes in one phrase, your course of action wouldn't be futile. I doubt it is entirely futile in this world: I suppose the net effect of what you suggest would be to highlight the utter lawlessness of international law, so that's perhaps a sensible thing to do.
Thiago.
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