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RANGEL AND THE DRAFT

Congressman Charles Rangel (D-NY) this week renewed his call for a reinstitution of conscription. Despite Rangel’s intent to tweak the admnistration on Iraq, and perhaps engage in a bit of personal nostalgia (Rangel is a Korean war vet), his legislation was immediately disavowed by Democratic Party leaders, including Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi(D-Ca.).

I’m reproducing some of my remarks here from a thread at The Small Wars Council. In 2003, prior to the invasion of Iraq, I took a look at the manpower needs of the U.S. military in an article for HNN:

“Why we should consider bringing back the draft“

Despite the headline ( which are selected by HNN editors, not authors), I’m ambivalent about conscription, as it will not be a magic bullet for our military and strategic problems but it is something that should be considered in combination with other approaches ( like simply raising new divisions of volunteers in the ground forces). The problem is that few solutions of any kind are being seriously considered at all by our politicians, despite urgent pleas from the military leadership like we saw yesterday. Washington is whistling in the dark.

Aside from the question of utility, as a serious infringement upon personal liberty, the American public will only accept a draft if they see a clear and direct need for one. I’m highly skeptical that there is sufficient trust in the government or a sense of urgency in the public mind today, to make conscription politically acceptable. Frankly, I do not trust the current administration to make wise strategic decisions regarding such a use of manpower that a draft would provide and I trust the Democrats even less. Only a military disaster of epic proportions will change the current dynamic.

Finally, many of the advantages to our current situation that would have accrued from a draft required implementation circa 2002, not in 2007. To an extent, the draft question is a debate among politicians about who can close the barn door with the most flourish. They need to move beyond cheap grandstanding and go to work on providing real support to our soldiers in the field.

NOVEMBER 22nd, 1963

“Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions, and where there is no vision the people perish”.” -Proverbs

The Kennedy assassination was the moment where the Boomer generation started to go off the rails.

Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, jr. and Robert Kennedy, rioting, the New Left, the 1968 Democratic Convention, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate – all these events left their psychological mark. We can hardly see the deserts of Iraq for all the rice paddies that permeate the mental landscape of the mainstream media and senior government officials. Our presidential elections re-argue the events of a war that ended before most younger voters were even born.

Would things though, have come out much differently for America, had Kennedy lived ?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON AND JEAN-FRANCOIS REVEL

Victor Davis Hanson writes with muscular prose and has been a provocative and successful historian, comfortable in going against the academic grain. I confess to rather liking many of the things he has to say in his books about the ancient world, not that I am any kind of an expert in the classics. On the other hand, as a pundit, Hanson has a tendency to make rhetorical leaps based upon assumptions that I would argue he has not thought through very well.

VDH’s comments on new developments in military theory, for example, showed him to be poorly informed about 4GW and NCW, though it would have been simple enough to do some basic reading before going off on a tangent. Similarly, today’s pessimistic post “Will the West Stumble?” shows a certain analytical hastiness and factual sketchiness in Hanson’s rush to gloom. His heart is in the right place; Hanson worries about all the right things to be worried about in the Terror War but I’m not inclined to believe, even with the extent to which we have bungled Iraq, that everything is going to come out exactly wrong for us in the end.

Hanson reminds me a lot of Jean-Francois Revel, the brilliant, anti-communist, French intellectual who thumbed his nose at European opinion and fearlessly penned How Democracies Perish in 1983, a searing look at the West’s faltering confrontation with Soviet Communism. The only problem with Revel’s deeply thoughtful but despairing analysis was that he wrote it but two years before Gorbachev would introduce glasnost and perestroika, six years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and eight years before the USSR itself ceased to exist.

The Soviets were not ten feet tall. Our Islamist enemies today are even shorter. We will take knocks along the way but pessemism be damned, America is going to win.

NEW TO THE BLOGROLL

A few new adds of late…..

Redneck’s Revenge

Progressive Historians

Larry Dunbar

The Creativity Exchange

Larry is a frequent commenter here as well as at closely related blogs like Tom Barnett and tdaxp. The Creativity Exchange is a new blog by ” thought leader” Dr. Richard Florida. Like Dr. Barnett, Florida has been featured at PopTech! and, as you can see below, had his ideas captured by artist Peter Durand:

RUN, NEWT, RUN!

I’ve decided to make an early endorsement of Newt Gingrich, who is not yet officially declared, for the GOP ‘s 2008 nomination for President of the United States. Why am I doing this ?

It’s not because Newt’s earlier quasi-libertarian, Toffler-futurist, conservatism meshed well with my own views, though it did. It’s not because Newt is likely to win the presidency, he’s a long shot at best even for the Republican nomination. I’m not endorsing him simply because he’s a historian, drinks Guinness, likes paleontology and writes book reviews on Amazon.com – though these are all fine things in my view.

I’m endorsing Gingrich simply because it will be healthy to have a candidate on stage who actually reads books and takes ideas with enough seriousness to effectively communicate them to a mainstream audience. Win or lose, Gingrich’s intellectual presence and inclination toward impulsive, rhetorical bomb-throwing will disrupt the hyperscripted performance of everyone else, something that will be all to the good. Frankly, I want to see all hell break loose on national television in such a way that the candidates might blurt out what they actually believe. Create enough of a media firestorm and all the Democratic candidates will have to respond as well.

Gingrich has the luxury of a win-win scenario. At a minimum, running a serious race raises Newt’s media profile, his influence and his future income stream from lectures and books; at maximum, lightning may strike and Gingrich could end up on the national ticket or at least resume his place as a powerbroker inside the Republican Party. He does not need to adopt the cautious, mannequin-like, ” frontrunner” posture that turns so many voters off to politicians. Gingrich can simply have fun.

Chances are, when Newt is long gone from the race, the ideas he bombastically injected into the body politic will still be very much part of the debate – much to the discomfort of the actual nominees.