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Originally posted by sugar and spice
Your first point could be proved wrong simply by looking at all the army Veterans out there who were against this war. At least in my city they were some of the first and most vocal protesters against it. There were a lot of men and women who served proudly in WWII, Korea and even Vietnam who were against this one.
And as for the second, I know plenty of people -- granted a lot of them are pretty young and don't know all that much yet -- who were against this war and didn't have a clue about the military's composition and what issues there are with it. And I'm sure some of them wouldn't have cared if they had.
There were a lot of reasons why people were against this war, not just some generic sense of hippie liberal pacifism. There were a lot of people who would have gladly supported it if it had been carried out differently or a different/better case had been made for it. And it was, for the most part, those people, not the hippie pacifists, who were the ones warning that going to Iraq was stretch our army too thin.
And I don't think that any of us are naive enough to believe that the draft is going to create equality. Instead of who has to serve in the army in order to get money for college and who gets their Daddy to put them through Princeton, it comes down to who has to do the actual fighting and who gets to skip out on his duties in the Texas Air National Guard.
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Heather, that is one of the most specious arguments that I have read. You live in Madison, Wisconson, a bastion of the American Left. Your anecdotal observations are anything but indicitive of a broad sampling of American veterans, or of the population as a whole.
Also, the United States has never entered into a war in which it had a fully staffed military. The US is currently suffering from Bill Clinton's decision to reduce the American miltary from two theater capability to one. The time that it would take to restore it back to two theater capability is at least a half decade.
But getting back to the point of this thread, people, like Charlie Rangel, who have recently called for the reinstatement of the draft, are putting class warfare ahead of what's best for America. Reservists have time, and time again proven to be less effective. The casualty rate of reservists in the current Iraqi theater of operations is
six times higher than that of fulltime professional soldiers.
Supporting the draft is essentially supporting a decrease in the effectiveness of the American military, an increase in American civil unrest, and a diminishment of the credibility of American force.