Andrew Bacevich blames all our ills on the common people and says only universal military service will make them shape up, goddammit.

One Percent Republic

From false premises like the one bolded below he draws the ludicrous conclusion that universal servitude militaire prevents the US government fighting stupid wars when the truth is it has always enabled just such stupidity when the people were too wary or incredulous to volunteer in sufficient numbers.

That is what a draft is for.

That is what a draft has always been for.

Take this one in the teeth, lefty anti-interventionists.

In evaluating the Global War on Terrorism, the overriding question is necessarily this one: has more than a decade of armed conflict enhanced the well-being of the American people?

The war fought by citizen-soldiers at the behest of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt did so.

Can we say the same for the war launched by George W. Bush and perpetuated in modified form by Barack Obama?

Post-WWII conventional liberals were the folks who fabricated and have most emphatically purveyed the idea that Father Abraham and wise old FDR, both of whom took the country to war against massive popular opposition, thus forced the country to do what was for its own good, despite the folly of the people.

They have never given up that nonsense and nowadays are even trying to rehabilitate Wilson’s decision to drag us into The Great War.

Up to now, only the globo-interventionsts who took over the Republican Party with the coming of the Cold War, William F. Buckley, Jr., and The National Review have joined in the chorus chanting that myth, a chorus that even includes right wing paleocons like Pat Buchanan for whom global alliances and wars half a world away lost their luster only after the fall of the Soviet Union and the conversion of the Chi-coms to capitalism.

Those post-Cold War, half-assed isolationists include friend Bacevich, who has now joined some Democrats in the lie or the folly of claiming giving our ruling class an even more vast military to play with will cause them to play less.

And that dragging every able bodied youth (and youthess?) into the military, thus providing vast supplies of canon-fodder, is the only way to enable the people to put a stop to wars that don’t truly serve the national interest.

Does anyone but me remember Korea and Vietnam?

His idea seems to be that if the people truly lack enthusiasm for a given war they will stop it with mass demonstrations.

Did the draft riots stop the Civil War?

Did the massive demonstrations of the 60’s stop the war, or only first the use of draftees in it and then the draft, after which the demonstrations stopped and the elites were perfectly free to pursue their idiot war for another few years, which they did?

Not only that, he attributes the success of the ascendant right in screwing up the economy and the country so nicely, also, to the lack of universal conscription.

For this absurdity of course he has no argument, but only bald and risible assertion.

Here it is.

Apathy toward war is symptomatic of advancing civic decay, finding expression in apathy toward the blight of child poverty, homelessness, illegitimacy, and eating disorders also plaguing the country.

Americans have registered opposition to the neocon wars for several years, now.

By ‘apathy’ he seems to mean lack of the mass demonstrations and rebellion provoked in the past by the draft.

He repeatedly blames the people for ‘apathy’ in what can only be this sense.

Shrugging off wars makes it that much easier for Americans—overweight, overmedicated, and deeply in hock—to shrug off the persistence of widespread hunger, the patent failures of their criminal justice system, and any number of other problems.

The thread that binds together this pattern of collective anomie is plain to see: unless the problem you’re talking about affects me personally, why should I care?

See?

People don’t care about illegitimacy, the failures of the criminal justice system, eating disorders, and widespread hunger [Really? They don’t?] because nobody drafted them, whether or not to fight in stupid wars.

Or because nobody drafted their kids.

A few years in the barracks, pal, for you or your son [and daughter?] and you’ll care about childhood obesity soon enough!

And this distortion is so gross that it is just a flat lie.

To a nation gearing up for global war, FDR had promised jobs, help for the vulnerable, an end to special privilege, the protection of civil liberties, and decisive military victory over the nation’s enemies.

To a considerable degree, Roosevelt made good on that promise. Judged by those same criteria, the Bush-Obama global war came up short on all counts.

So Roosevelt promised and delivered on the New Deal in exchange for the blood of the nation’s youth in a war that came after the New Deal?

That is what happened?

Not on your life.

Roosevelt promised the American people all that three times starting in 1932 in return for their votes, not for the lives of their children in a war they continued to refuse him right up to December, 1941.

Besides blaming the American people for not rioting and rebelling, not being drafted, and not caring enough about being overmedicated, he blames them for dumping the burden of war that belongs on their shoulders [according to him] onto “the 1%” who actually volunteer for it – though of course it is exactly the willingness of these latter fools that actually enables our elites to prosecute the dumb-ass wars Bacevich speaks so ill of.

Yes, I am saying if Bacevich wants to blame somebody for enabling the elites to get us into stupid wars he should be blaming those who volunteer so proudly to fight them – and then so needily demand our endless praise and thanks for having done so.

Instead, he will just give us the old “freedom isn’t free” and “land of the free because of the brave” bullshit.

Yet a people who permit war to be waged in their name while offloading onto a tiny minority responsibility for its actual conduct have no cause to complain about an equally small minority milking the system for all it’s worth.

Crudely put, if the very rich are engaged in ruthlessly exploiting the 99 percent who are not, their actions are analogous to that of American society as a whole in its treatment of soldiers: the 99 percent who do not serve in uniform just as ruthlessly exploit the 1 percent who do.

Bacevich is an increasingly influential and celebrated man who has chosen to write a burst of propaganda aimed at half-educated half-wits.

Which makes him well suited to his chosen role of political wise-man.

Or even for a future in elective office.

He finishes with this crap so awful I won’t even comment on it except to point out that here he even goes so far as to implicitly claim the neocon wars failed for lack of draftees to fight them through to success and pretty much explicitly threaten that without a draft Americans will have to pay a price in lost freedom.

Or maybe that’s only obesity?

The choice Americans face today ends up being as straightforward as it is stark.

If they believe war essential to preserving their freedom, it’s incumbent upon them to prosecute war with the same seriousness their forebears demonstrated in the 1940s.

Washington’s war would then truly become America’s war with all that implies in terms of commitment and priorities.

Should Americans decide, on the other hand, that freedom as presently defined is not worth the sacrifices entailed by real war, it becomes incumbent upon them to revise their understanding of freedom.

Either choice—real war or an alternative conception of freedom—would entail a more robust definition of what it means to be a citizen.

Don’t you love it when such obvious enemies of our freedom as AB tell us we have to accept their impositions and their re-definitions of freedom and citizenship, or else?

The title of his blasted book says it all, no?