Draft Pondering?

[interesting bits on the draft in this piece. /a]

Is Iraq Another Vietnam?
by The Editors
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0604editors.htm

An indication of just how bad things have become for the U.S. invaders and
occupiers of Iraq is that comparisons with the Vietnam War are now
commonplace in the U.S. media. In a desperate attempt to put a stop to
this, President Bush intimated on April 13, in one of his rare press
conferences, that the mere mention of the Vietnam analogy in relation to
the present war was unpatriotic and constituted a betrayal of the troops.
Yet the question remains and seems to haunt the U.S. occupation of Iraq:
To what extent has Iraq become another Vietnam for American imperialism?

...

The main lesson that the ruling class seems to have drawn from the [Iraq]
war so far is that a much larger military force is needed to maintain the
occupation. According to Business Week (April 26, 2004), "the U.S. hold on
Iraq remains weak. Staying on track will require two things: more troops
to maintain security, supplemented by a craftier political strategy." In
the words of Bruce Nussbaum, Business Week's editorial page editor:

    "There is a denial [in Washington] that the military strategy going
into Iraq, the Rumsfeld Doctrine, is a failure. The best hope left of
establishing a stable Iraqi democracy is to replace that doctrine, which
emphasizes small, light, and fast military operations, with its rival, the
Powell Doctrine, devised by then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Colin Powell. The Powell Doctrine calls for overwhelming force shaped by
very clear political goals and a specific exit strategy, two things
lacking today in Iraq. The failure of the Rumsfeld Doctrine in Iraq is all
too clear---too few boots on the ground, too little legitimacy for America
and its handpicked Governing Council, too many shifting goals, and no
clear exit strategy. The result in recent weeks has been a cycle of
kidnappings, ambushes, counterstrikes, death, and destruction that
increasingly echoes the disaster in Vietnam....What is to be done now? A
return to the Powell Doctrine would accomplish a number of key goals.
Significantly higher troop levels would crush, finally, Baathist
resistance and provide more security to Iraqis....The realpolitik of the
Powell Doctrine would also force Washington to limit its goals and make
its exit strategy clear."

Such a reversion to the Powell Doctrine would mean a massive escalation of
the military force in Iraq. The United States currently has 135,000 troops
in Iraq and more than 150,000 in the entire Iraqi theatre of operations,
which includes Kuwait and other neighboring countries. Other coalition
forces, about half of which are British, have contributed another 25,000
troops to the occupation. Nevertheless, Business Week writes that
"analysts, such as Rand Corp. peacekeeping expert and former State Dept.
special envoy James Dobbins say that as many as 400,000 troops are needed
to match the peacekeeping clout used in other volatile countries. The
250,000 Iraqis the U.S. hopes to have in uniform will help, but the
[Iraqi] security services' recent refusal to fight fellow Iraqis shows
they aren't up to the task---and won't be for at least a year." This
translates into a demand for stepped-up deployment of U.S. soldiers. Where
are all of these additional troops to come from? Initially, according to
Business Week, this can be accomplished by rotating back units that have
already done service in Iraq. Later on some other solution to the lack of
"military manpower" must be found.

Other establishment outlets agree that a major escalation is called for.
The New York Times (April 25, 2004) said, "This is not the moment for
retreat and it certainly is not the moment for half measures." Many more
troops than present administration plans call for are needed according to
that publication:

    "Sending more troops will cause further pain to an already strained
military and it means acknowledging that units now being rotated home
should be sent back to Iraq. But there seems to be no other choice. Much
of the current trouble could have been avoided if Mr. Rumsfeld had not
been so determined to disprove the doctrine named for his rival, Secretary
of State Colin Powell, which posits that force, if it is to be used at
all, should be overwhelming....The United States should have had a much
larger military force ready to actually occupy Iraq and restore order."

The momentum of the occupation thus points to a substantial escalation of
U.S. force levels in Iraq at least in the short-term. A major goal of the
United States is to create a large Iraqi military force that can confront
those Iraqi nationalists currently fighting the American occupation. But
so far the efforts to create a new Iraqi army on which the United States
could depend to help suppress Iraqi resistance have proven ineffectual.
Although the United States has allocated $1.8 billion to the new Iraqi
army so far it has managed to train less than 4,000 out of a planned
40,000 soldiers.  Half of the first battalion of the new army quit late
last year on the grounds that the pay was inadequate. When the second
battalion was called in to help fight the Iraqi resistance in Fallujah in
April many soldiers refused, saying that they had signed up to fight
Iraq's foreign enemies not fellow Iraqis (Wall Street Journal, April 24,
2004).

...

All of this points to the fact that the biggest military obstacle that the
United States faces in its occupation of Iraq is an acute shortage of
troops. Here too the comparison with Vietnam cannot be avoided. As MR
editors Harry Magdoff and [the late] Paul Sweezy wrote in this space in
December 1969:

    "It is extremely important to understand that U.S. imperialism's
greatest weakness is precisely a shortage of military manpower. The
Vietnam war is showing that the once-widespread hope of being able to
substitute technology for manpower in fighting counter-revolutionary wars
is an illusion. The United States has about 3.5 million men in the armed
services at the present time (the largest military establishment in the
world), and of this number at least a fifth are directly or indirectly
tied down by a war in one small country many thousands of miles away from
home. Much of the remainder is spread thin over more than 250 military
bases located in some 30 countries around the globe. Considering the fact
that the United States has arrogated to itself the role of world
policeman...the present extreme dissipation of military resources brought
about by the Vietnam war and the world-wide system of bases leaves a
perilously small strategic reserve for deployment in any new crisis areas.

In earlier capitalist empires, particularly those of the British and
French, it was possible to conquer and maintain control over far-flung
global possessions without recourse to conscript armies from the mother
country. The chief reasons for this were the weakness of colonial
resistance movements, their lack of access to modern weapons (as Hilaire
Belloc said, "Whatever happens, we have got The Maxim Gun, and they have
not), and the recruitment of soldiers from amongst the unemployed and
underemployed in the advanced capitalist countries (coupled with native
armies drawn from colonial territories). By the time of the Vietnam War,
however, the United States had no option but to rely on conscripts to
carry out its imperial objectives. No longer were third world resistance
movements politically incohesive, their capacity to obtain modern weaponry
sufficient to fight a guerrilla war had increased, and a pool of
unemployed in the United States adequate to maintain a volunteer army on
the scale required did not exist. Still, the United States shied away from
universal military service as a means of maintaining its empire. After the
Vietnam War, which had shown the dangers of relying on conscripts to fight
an unpopular imperialist war, the United States turned to a smaller
all-volunteer military (made practicable by a larger reserve army of labor
in a period of stagnation), under the renewed belief that technology could
limit the need for troops on the ground.

In only a year Iraq has demonstrated this to be an illusion. The entire
volunteer army scheme for maintaining the U.S. empire is in tatters. The
U.S. ruling class is demanding more combat troops for Iraq and there are
no forces available, given that the United States, eager to monopolize the
spoils of war, chose to intervene in Iraq virtually alone, with
significant support only from its much smaller British partner. The
extremity of the situation was foreshadowed by a Congressional Budget
Office (CBO) report submitted as testimony before the Armed Services
Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives on November 5, 2003. That
report indicated "the active Army would be unable to sustain an occupation
force of its present size beyond about March 2004 if it chose not to keep
individual units deployed to Iraq for longer than one year without
relief." To maintain a "steady state" or "indefinite" occupation under
present conditions, the CBO report stressed, troop levels would have to
fall to the 38,000 to 64,000 level. The only other options were for the
United States to alter rotation patterns (taxing the strength of its
volunteer army and going against the basis on which recruitment and
retention occurs); drawing heavily on Marine, National Guard, and special
forces units; using financial incentives to try to get soldiers to accept
another tour of duty; reducing its military deployments in the Sinai
Peninsula, Bosnia, and Kosovo; and finding ways to privatize many military
activities, thereby freeing up more soldiers for combat. ...

It is in these circumstances of an acute shortage of soldiers that
Congress is once again sending signals that the draft will have to be
reinitiated in the United States, despite its enormous unpopularity. This
is presented as a case of fairness designed to equalize the class burden
of the war, which right now is falling entirely on the working class---or
in establishment parlance the middle and lower classes, representing
ordinary working people and the poor. "Who's doing all the fighting?"
Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska asked on the NBC Today show in
late April.  According to Hagel the War on Terrorism is possibly "a
generational, probably 25 year war" and thus should fall on all classes in
the society.  On the same program Joe Biden, Democratic senator from
Delaware, declared that the U.S. military is too small and probably could
not be brought up to its needed strength except on a conscript basis.
Charles Rangel, a Democratic congressman from New York, has also come out
strongly in favor of a resurrection of the draft. Ralph Nader has warned:
"Today, enlistments in the Reserves and National Guard are declining. The
Pentagon is quietly recruiting new members to fill local draft boards, as
the machinery for drafting a new generation of young Americans is being
quietly put into place. Young Americans need to know that a train is
coming, and it could run over their generation in the same way that the
Vietnam War devastated the lives of those who came of age in the '60s"
(Toronto Star, "U.S. Weighs the Return of Military Conscription", April
22, 2004).

...

There is a further reason for the United States to continue to prosecute
the war in Iraq. Anything that would appear to be a defeat would bring
back the Vietnam Syndrome"---a term coined by conservatives to refer to
the popular refusal on the part of the American public to support major
military interventions in third world countries following the defeat in
Vietnam. The Iraq War was supposed to have marked the final recovery from
the Vietnam Syndrome and the full restoration of U.S. imperial power. Now
suddenly memories of the most disastrous aspects of the Vietnam War from
the standpoint of U.S. imperialism (frequent guerrilla ambushes,
unrelenting popular resistance, flag-draped coffins, and U.S. atrocities)
are flooding back. This loss of credibility for U.S. imperial power is
rightly regarded by those at the top of U.S. society as the greatest
danger raised by the present war. It also represents the ultimate reason
that the U.S. war machine finds it difficult to withdraw, unless it can
find some face-saving formula. All of this produces a momentum for a
continuation and even escalation of the war.

Yet, there are also forces driving in the other direction. The most
important of these is the growing Iraqi resistance. Another is the
negative response with which U.S. allies are likely to greet any
escalation of the war. Finally, there is the diminishing support for the
war in the United States itself, which could translate eventually, if
further escalation occurs, into a powerful antiwar movement. At that point
the Vietnam War analogy would be inescapable.
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