Thinking of a Romney presidency makes my stomach churn with anxiety and fear. I think President Obama will win, but until that last ballot is cast, I'm not taking anything for granted. I thought about how many Bush alumni would be in Romney's cabinet, taking with them their failed ideology of pre-emptive strikes and nation building, spreading death to another Middle Eastern country. Steve Schmidt took offense to Rachel Maddow saying that the Iraq War was based on a lie, saying he was "proud to serve in the Bush administration", overseeing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Then something hit me:
If we go to war with Iran, there's no way the draft won't be reinstated.
Our forces are spread thin. We have a record number of military suicides happening per month. Some soldiers are serving upwards of 12 consecutive tours of duty because of the stop loss policy. We're even using reservists to add manpower. Now, we do have plenty of people looking for careers in the military because of the weak economy, but with 80,000 some odd men in Afghanistan, special forces operating in Africa, and the numbers needed to provide logistics for our gigantic military structure, I'm not sure our military would have the man power to perform a land invasion of Iran or if air power would be sufficient in and of itself to accomplish whatever goals we would have there. Never mind the fact that more and more Americans are turning away from the war.
So far, not having a draft has allowed the war to remain far from the American consciousness. I am saying this as a male that would be fully eligible if a draft came up. We don't see caskets draped in American flags. We don't get pictures of the gruesome cruelty of war in Iraq. We were not told of American atrocities that happen during times of war. We're not having an honest discussion about our countries militarism and our penchant for visiting death and destruction on other countries and our inability to see the fallacy of "American Exceptionalism." We've apparently gotten over our Vietnam Syndrome. To me, all that means is we've made compassion a dirty word.
I'm from a military family, so I always talk carefully about war. The funny thing is, I thought about making a career in the military, but my military family members put the kibosh on that in seconds. They say that I'm not cut out for it, that it's not for me. My uncle did special ops in Vietnam and rescued people from prison camps, so I'll take his word for it. I understand that there are evil, awful people in the world that have to be met with force. Sometimes it's inevitable. Sometimes there's nothing you can do but tell your population to sacrifice their lives and their sanity for the good of the whole. War pits you in black and white situations. If someone points a gun at you, shoot them. If they use women and children as shields, fire bomb them. Before you rescue people from an area, make sure the enemy is all dead so they don't shoot you as you're escaping. Basing your actions on surviving makes decision making easy, but it makes having compassion and being human almost impossible, since those are life's gray areas. Besides, your enemy will do even more inhuman acts to win. Last year I read an excellent book called Citizen Soldier, depicting how ordinary people dealt with being flung into Hell.
Our country refuses to learn from it's past. It's too set on believing that it's right in everything it does. Reagan convinced Americans they could do no wrong, that their defeat in war was because of their leaders, and that they shouldn't feel bad about sacrificing 3 million Vietnamese to remake the country in their image.
Iraq has shown me that we haven't learned our lesson, and our volunteer military enables the American people to avoid a difficult, gut wrenching conversation.
Romney didn't talk about Afghanistan or Iraq in his speech. He talked about being tough with America's enemies and calling Putin out by name. Childish. I wondered how people in that stadium would fare, seeing the face of war in reality? How will they feel when their children have to be rushed off to a foreign country to watch people die? Will they be able to come home and deal with memories of seeing their friends cut in half by enemy fire? Will we be able to go back to our gated communities, our strip malls, or the Wallmart prosperity hologram?
If there is a draft, I think I'd follow my childhood hero, Muhammad Ali.