Should Progressives & the Anti-War Movement Oppose the Concept of A Military Draft?

Published: August 15, 2007, 12:55 pm

This is another in the regular series called Strategery, which is written by David Sirota and appears Wednesdays on OpenLeft. When news came down last week that President Bush's top war adviser wants to consider a military draft, I got a lot of email and saw many progressive blogs light up in outrage. But here's the question: Assuming a draft would be administered fairly (admittedly a big assumption), would stopping a draft really be the best strategy to serve the cause of ending the Iraq War and stopping future misguided wars? In a column for the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this year, I wrote: A rule of thumb for understanding American politics: The federal government only reacts to popular will when the upper-middle professional class starts making noise. Everyone else's voice falls on deaf ears. This is an unfortunate reality, but it is reality. Consider the last few decades. Many historians believe anti-war pressure during the Vietnam War only really changed public policy

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