>So how many other countries has forced conscription stopped wars for? Israel? Any others?
Interesting you should mention that. I recall Tariq Ali on Doug's show making the point that the Israeli military brass was *extremely* disappointed in the performance of their troops during the Lebanon debacle. It was not something they expected. Those damned civilian kids made lousy soldiers; too used to gaming and into their iPods and DVDs.
>Yeah, maybe the US is culturally different than Israel, etc., but the idea of supporting STATE-FORCED conscription/slavery of human beings, and to become not crop framers, trained murderers is so incredibly fucking odious that I'm amazed it's seriously on the table here. Yes, let's put militarizing the youth on the table -- thanks, progressives.
OF COURSE it's odious!!! WAR **IS** FUCKING ODIOUS!!! But much of this presently-at-war society we're living in isn't getting that message. Due to the craven greedhead lapdog behavior of the media, and the "professional army", we have been INSULATED from this basic fact. This damn war is a video game. If this society is so willing to wage war, as it seems to be...then let *the society* feel the pain, in as many different ways as possible. Let American lives be disrupted as so many Iraqi lives have been. No, actually, there is no way American lives can be anywhere near as cataclysmically affected as have the people of Iraq. But let the rich and the privileged get called on the carpet to do their share. Let W have to get up and *explain* to the people why HIS kids aren't serving, let all of Congress do the same, if this war is so fucking important and right.
I don't believe any of those people who devised this have any kind of ethic about sending their own to fight and die, or have their lives disrupted. If they did, their kids would be serving already. BUT THEY'RE NOT. They're in school, they're socialites. Well, screw that.
And as far as training kids to be killers...the fact is, it's very very difficult in general to get draftees to be good soldiers. Conscripts make OK soldiers at best. Civilians always want to go home. Unless the reasons are clear and make sense, they don't want to fight. The military actually did melt down in Vietnam. They accepted a professional army after that because they knew such troops would be much more amenable to control.
I guess what I'm saying is, a conscript army would not have gone along with this mess, and the folks back home wouldn't have tolerated it for this long. It would have ripped this society apart like Vietnam eventually did. Only today it would happen a lot faster.