> ***** "This is significant," said Ned Lebow, a presidential scholar
> at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and former professor of strategy
> at the National War College in Washington.
>
> "What the department of Defense is doing is creating the
> infrastructure to make the draft a viable option should the
> administration wish to go this route."
Yes, this is evidence that some SSS bureaucrats are busy down in their moles putting an infrastructure together. It is not evidence that the administration at this point "wishes to go this route." Still less is it evidence, as I guess you would also argue, given your Bush = Kerry principle, that Kerry would want to go that route.
They're certainly having a rough time in Iraq at this point. Are they thinking of flooding Iraq with more troops, in a quantity that could only be supplied by draftees? How long does it take to train draftees to the point that they can go to the front lines? I'm not a military expert, and never was in the military, so I'm not sure, but I think it takes a while. So if they announced they were starting the draft this week, it would probably be months from now at the earliest that the draftees could be used.
And how well would this play with the U.S. public, given that it seems to be souring on the war? If Bush were to restart the draft, I would expect that he would wait until he won the election and was safe to do it. But it is beginning to look that he might not win, unless Nader helps him (thanks to you and your comrades).
However, let's assume the worst -- Bush or possibly Kerry restarts the draft. Fine -- then we destroy it again the way we destroyed it the last time: through non-cooperation.
I well recall doing anti-conscription work in Portland OR in the late '60s -- leafleting inductees to try to inform them about refusing induction in front of the local induction center early in the morning when they were marched in and being treated hostilely by the military types. I though it was lonely, futile work. But after the war ended, and the SSS had been abandoned by the Pentagon, I read in the news that the Portland induction center had had the highest no-show rate in the country after the Oakland center. There were a lot of induction refusers, all right, but they weren't at the center where I was leafleting -- they had just torn up their "greetings from the President" and stayed home, or left for Canada. By that time, there were so many guys who ignored their draft notices that the FBI would never have had the ability to find all of them.
This time, the draft would start with a fairly high level of resistance among the population, and build from there. Everything is happening in this war pretty much as it happened with the Vietnam war, except speeded up -- what took years then is taking months or weeks.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ Belinda: Ay, but you know we must return good for evil. Lady Brute: That may be a mistake in the translation.
-- Sir John Vanbrugh: The Provok’d Wife (1697), I.i.