Noam Chomsky Is Mistaken On The Draft

CounterPunch
February 4, 2005

Even Homer Nods
Chomsky and Conscription
By JACOB LEVICH

Noam Chomsky is so rarely wrong about anything that it feels impertinent to correct him. But his recent remarks on the draft, printed in CounterPunch (Feb. 2), are in need of scrutiny, especially since they might give false comfort to people who rightly worry that a revival of conscription is in the cards.

Chomsky says the US is unlikely to reinstate the draft because of "the Vietnam experience," which was "the first time in the history of European imperialism that an imperial power tried to fight a colonial war with a citizens' army." He continues:

"I mean the British didn't do it, and the French had the Foreign Legion in colonial wars, civilians are just no good at it. Colonial wars are too brutal and vicious and murderous. You just can't take kids off the street and have them fight that kind of war. You need trained killers, like the French Foreign Legion."

Chomsky has been saying this a lot lately, and consequently the notion that conscripts can't fight dirty wars has taken its place among the Top Ten left-of-center myths about the draft, right alongside "the draft is fairer to the poor and minorities" and (don't laugh) "the Establishment wouldn't support wars of aggression if they thought their children might get drafted." Because Chomsky is usually so reliable, a lot of good people seem to be swallowing his argument uncritically, which is why it calls for correction.

What really puzzles me is Chomsky's bald assertion that the Vietnam War was the first time a European power tried to fight a colonial war using draftees. That's just not so. Just to name one counterexample, the Italian conquest of Ethiopia in 1935-36, a murderous colonial war by any standard, was fought with conscripted troops.

What's significant here is that fascist Italy introduced universal conscription precisely for the purpose of facilitating colonial expansion. So did imperial Japan. And once you let Asia into the equation, Chomsky's argument truly collapses.

Following WWII, the great powers variously used proxies, mercenaries, volunteers, UN "peacekeepers," and conscripts to fight their colonial wars. Results were mixed. In general, all categories of soldier proved capable of producing the kinds of atrocities required by their masters -- the My Lai massacre, for instance, was perpetrated by draftees.

In the end, "volunteers vs. draftees" is the wrong way of looking at the problem. What history actually shows is that imperialist powers will eventually use whatever type and size of force they believe to be necessary from a military point of view, regardless of morale issues and political cost. LBJ was well aware that expanding the draft would be a risky proposition; he did it anyway because he saw no other way of winning the war. There's a good chance Bush will do the same.

If any further example is needed, remember that the most vicious, brutal, murderous, and protracted colonial war in the world today is being fought -- at tremendous cost to military and domestic morale -- by draftees. I'm talking, of course, about Israel's war on the Palestinian people. Given Chomsky's tireless truth-telling about Palestine, it's an inexplicable oversight. Even Homer nods.

Please read the entire article at:

http://www.counterpunch.org/levich02042005.html

the current extensions on the guard are a form of draft.

Also, they could conscript people not currently in the military to do support work, cooks, drivers, cargo pilots, mechanics, nurses, doctors and others who don't have to do the direct fighting, and then use other military support people to do the fighting. A lot of that is happening right now with civilian 'contractors' and I'm sure we will continue doing more of that since the recruiters are not having a happy time right now.

Bush's World Conquest Agenda will go on, with or without a draft of those who do the actual fighting.

Bush's colonial ambitions will proceed if Congress continues to fund them. What was the vote on the last military appropriations bill?

they wouldn't be able to make enough uniforms.

a normal Republican administration wouldn't do it. I'm still not convinced Bush is going to do it. But if it happens, it's because Bush and a few neocans decide they're just going to override their own party and the entire country.

Really ought to look into the history of matters he intends to comment on. He is wildly mistaken concerning the Italian conquest of Ethiopia. The principle striking infantry of Italy in that invasion were Eritrian and Somali mercenaries officered by Italians; these were not only volunteer troops, but animated by traditional feuds against the Ethiopians, and a profound warrior ethos. The next most important were elite formations such as the Alpini and Bersegliari, mostly comprised of volunteer enlistees. Even the Blackshirt formations involved were not conscripts, but politicized party militiamen.

Conscripts are certainly capable of brutality, particularly when, as in Viet Nam, they become convinced the enemy is brutal and cruel, which was certainly the case in that conflict. But conscripts do not stand dealing out brutality as well as regular volunteers; they retain too many ties to civilian standards, that a long service trooper cuts entirely. Professor Chomskey is here rather in advance of the "usual suspects" at Counterpunch, and his analysis is broadly correct. Conscription will certainly be a last resort, and a sign of impending defeat for the imperial design should it be resorted to. The Congress that votes for it would be out on its ear, and the Congress-critters know that well....

And your view on Israel's conscripts Sir? They seem just a bit brutal .... but only if you're merely a Palestianian and I'm not so sure they count.

We could trot about that track a few times, but it would not be much help to you. As brutal armies go, the Israelis are well to the rear of the pack clotted behind the clear favorites. The contrast between, say, Grozny, and Jenin, is most instructive when honestly compared....

"Kill all, burn all, loot all!"

"I made them a stadium in the middle of the camp"
http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives/kurdi_eng.html

Roughly fisty Arab Palestinians were killed, and Human Rights Watch agrees that roughly half of them were combatants by their most stringent standards. No one knows how many thousands were killed in Grozny, and any student of the trade would be surprised to learn one in ten were combatants.

"Once you have gilded it, it no longer is a lily."

and Human Rights Watch do not seem to be in complete agreement.

Colin Powell
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/4/24/200853.shtml

Human Rights Watch
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/israel3/

The United Nations Thursday disbanded a fact-finding committee it wanted to send to Jenin after the Israeli government refused to cooperate with the team unless it complied with conditions the UN deemed unacceptable.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0503-04.htm

Human Rights Watch did not characterize the events as a massacre either, and was at some pains to discredit wild reports made at the time, in such journals as Z-mag and Counter-Punch, of mass graves and hundreds shot out of hand. They also criticize some elements of the Israeli operation, such as use of human shields, that are certainly criminal, and undoubtedly occured. They disapprove of the action itself, thoiugh it seemed a proper one to me, but they would hardly be doing their job by their own lights if they did not. But they were scrupulous and honest in their investigation and presentation of facts. It would be a pleasure if more, on both sides of this matter, would conduct themselves so well.

On another note, Mr. Decorum, it puzzles me somewhat that you had to resort to News Max to quote a public statement, widely reported at the time, by a U.S. Secretary of State. Surely it could be found at other locations. How much time of your time, Sir, do you spend on such sites, and how much of your information do you draw, in this and other matters, from organizations devoted to the promotion of reaction, and the destruction of left and progressive elements in our polity?

deserve each other.

Does NewsMax deserve you? Or perhaps more to the point, do you deserve NewsMax...?

"If you lie down with dogs you will rise up with fleas."

is the name of this thread.
I suggest you return to discussing the merits and demerits of that statement.

"If you lie down with fleas, you might not get up at all."

He arrives at the conclusion : The Imperialist US and the Imperialist West are evil genocidal maniacs led by reactionary monsters and they prey on the third world and we are the cause of all the worlds ills and all the suffering...etc etc

So, I guess they failed too.

In fact, in Ethiopia, if I remember correctly, the Italians suffered one of the worst, bloodiest defeats in a single battle at the hands of the formerly colonized ever.

Didn't they suffer a loss so devestating that the Italian government fell?

I might have this totally mixed up, but wasn't that the case?

on edit: oops, the battle of adua (adwa?) was in 1896 and was probably the reason Italy tried again in the '30s.

That was in the late nineteenth century, and eclipsed only by the Riffian slaughter of Spanish coinscripts i the Annual campaign a few years after World War One.

It is hard to point to any Italian defeats in the Abbysinian War, though there were some close run things, particularly in Shire, where Italian dorces expended over a million cartridges in a single day. The Ethiopians fought with extraordinary courage and self-sacrifice, though at tremendous deficiets in firepower and organization. It is an appalling passage of history.

Thanks. I'll google for more info about the Spanish slaughter.

Cantor Fitzgerald Risk Assessment
In the late 1990s, Thomas Barnett, a Harvard-educated professor of military strategy at the Naval War College, teamed up with the bond trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald to study how the US military might react to a hypothetical, interconnected catastrophe such as a terrorist attack on Wall Street. The results were grim. "People heard our brief," Barnett later recalled, "but everyone thought we were too apocalyptic, too out-there."
The largest corporate victim of the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001?
Cantor Fitzgerald.
The firm, which occupied 250,000 square feet in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, lost 658 of its 960 employees.
(Within weeks, Barnett was called to the Pentagon and installed as the assistant for strategic futures in the Office of Force Transformation, Office of the Secretary of Defense.)
http://www.anecdotage.com/index.php?aid=16044

In what Barnett calls a "Grand March of History" he claims that the U.S. military must be transformed in order to preemptively take control of the gap, so the U.S. can "manage" the global distribution of resources, people, energy, and money. (It has long predicted that the gap between rich and poor around the world will continue to widen and that the Pentagon will be used to keep the boot on the necks of the people of the third world to the benefit of corporate globalization.)

Barnett predicts that U.S. unilateralism will lead to the "inevitability
of war." Referring to Hitler in a recent presentation, Barnett reminded his military audience that the Nazi leader never asked for permission before invading other countries. Thus, the end to multi-lateralism.

Barnett argues that the days of arms talks and international treaties are over. "There is no secret where we are going," he says as he calls for a "new ordering principle" at the Department of Defense (DoD). Barnett maintains that as jobs move out of the U.S. the primary export product of the nation will be "security." Global energy demand will necessitate U.S. control of the oil producing regions. "We will be fighting in Central Africa in 20 years," Barnett predicts.

In order to implement this new military vision," Barnett maintains that the U.S. military must move away from its often-competing mix of Air Force-Navy-Army-Marines toward two basic military services. One he names Leviathan, which he defines as the kick ass, wage war, special ops, and not under the purview of the international criminal court. Give us your angry, video game-playing 18-19 year olds, for the Leviathan force, Barnett says. Once a country is conquered by Leviathan, Barnett says the U.S. will have to have a second military force that he calls Systems Administration. This force he describes as the "proconsul" of the empire, boots on the ground, the police force to control the local populations. This group, Barnett says, "will never come home."
http://www.rense.com/general61/agemnda.htm

Referring to Hitler in a recent presentation,
Barnett reminded his military audience that
the Nazi leader never asked for permission before invading other countries.

Thomas Barnett claims to be a Democrat.

...so that we don't have a destabilizing polorization of wealth, and also so that we can create even more wealth, as we learned when the US decided in the '30s that a middle class should form made up of people who, through fair reward for their labor, could participate in the wealth created here?

He assumes a draft is unlikely because of the "Vietnam experience", but our country is currently being run by idealogues with a disconnect from reality. They've shown an unprecendented ability to ignore the lessons of the past- and even common sense- in favor of ideology.

For instance, when they disbanded the Iraqi army, they were ignoring the lessons of history and common sense, and simply following a simplistic "de-Baathification" ideal.

There's alot of amoral practicality in the neocons' ideology, but they aren't pragmatists by any stretch of the imagination.

the moment a draft is re-instated

There are ways around this...Anybody hear of the "guest worker" program Bushco wants to pass. HE can draft foreigners into the imperial army so who needs the political repercussions of a domestic draft?

Foreign born US military personnel won't carry the political baggage of a domestic population. In many cases, they have only poverty to return to so will prove to be viscious and loyal fighters. Perfect combination for empire building military. THey also have the advantage of having little problem "policing" us citizens in case of martial law

although in linguistics he's been frequently egregiously wrong.

Well, "wrong" isn't the right word. Merely in a state of having to thoroughly revise his theories from top to bottom in order to incorporate well-known data that crashed his previous theories. But never "wrong".