The Daily Show Advocates for a Draft

In what I can only understand as a continued frustration with the wars Bush started and Obama failed to end, the argument was made by Allison Stanger, prof. at Middlebury College in VT, that the existence of contractor based armies allowed wars to be perpetrated without the public outcry which a war fought with a draft would be accompanied.

Follow this link to the Stanger interview:

[At 2:10 on the transcript]:

JS: "Is the dirty secret of this is that it is being done this way now, you mentioned Vietnam, because we don't have a draft. If we had a draft these jobs wouldn't be necessary to contract out..."

AS: "Well, That is a great point, and that is precisely why I think we need to have a public discussion about this transformation in the way we fight wars, because without contractors we would have to have a draft to fight those two wars and with the draft we would obviously have a very different political situation on our hands..."

JS: "It almost like an interesting 'Catch-22' ... If we uh... uh... we are fighting these wars with contractors ... If we had a draft we wouldn't need the contractors... My guess is that if we had a draft we wouldn't have the wars... My guess is Iraq would have been a much more... I mean

[Spirited Applause from the Audience]

JS: "Afghanistan perhaps... But, Iraq... If there were a draft people would have been less inclined to go [garbled]"

AS: "You are right, you have absolutely nailed it, you are absolutely right..."

[End Transcript at 3:07]

I consider one of the great triumphs of American history the overcoming of the draft. I have never been more convinced that I have less in common with the John Stewart crowd than I was last night. This interview, Mr. Stewart's seeming unwillingness to see the evil of the draft for his desire to focus on the evil of the Bush wars, and the crowd's reaction have alienated me from this particular interview.

I cannot treat advocacy for a draft, the ability for a government to force its citizens to war, as a misunderstanding. Something else is more important than liberty to Mr. Stewart and Ms. Stanger. I don't want to speculate, but this interview strikes me as dark.

I believe in a market, even for war, in fact -- especially for war. The idea that we should use a draft because we can't constrain our government from starting unjust wars (regardless of the merits of this particular example) is incredible. Just because this is possible when they have access contractors, does not mean that it is less possible when they can conscript. Conscription has been the tool of tyrants fighting unjust wars since the dawn of monarchy. We should, rather, place limits on the size of government and the budget for the military industrial complex. It seems both John and Allison would rather have a large state that can tell you to grab a gun and stand in front of our "enemies" for whatever happens to be the politically correct person to shoot at on that day.

I find this to be a very gross failure of political thinking on Mr. Stewart's part. I am ashamed to have chosen his show last night as my form of entertainment.