Wednesdays, Lincoln
Wednesdays, Omaha
The Most Dangerous Place on the Face of the Earth
Updates on Nebraska's tiny reservation border town.
Impeachment is on the table.
By Paul Olson, NFP President
By Professor Bruce E. Johansen
Omaha NFP Newsletter
An Injury to One is an Injury to All…
The World Will End in Fire
On Liars that Figure
It’s the War, Stupid
Forty & Counting
The Wind from Somewhere
Crying Wolf & Becoming the Too Fat Frog
Paradise Lost, Hell’s Apples & the CIA
Downwind from Nuclear
Holocaust and WackoAn Ethic of Life
An Ethic of DeathRed State: Blue State
The Burning Of Earth
Wahoo Memories & Iranian Democracy
On Bullying
War and Debt: The Don Reeves Alternative to a Draft
Killing the Huddled Masses Yearning to Be Free
How to Win in a Gilded Age
On Fear
Holy Lands, Unholy Wars
On Sacrifice
Education & Tax Justice
Killing the Huddled Masses
Yearning to Be Free
Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus
“There is no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft and members of Congress and the administration thought that their kids... would be placed in harm’s way.” -Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY)
The election is over. Where the Democrats won the House handily and the Senate by two votes, Iraq was the issue — our preemptive going to war, its conduct, the deaths, the torture. Peace activists throughout the nation should be proud of Nov. 7, 2006. From the beginning, we said ‘No’ to the Afghan War, ‘No’ to the Iraq War, ‘No’ to American torture, and ‘No’ to neo-con bullying by Cheney, “Rummy” and the rest. We favored international law, international alliances, a “New Deal” for the Middle East, and the maximum use of international law accompanied by Interpol policing against Al-Qaida. We were almost alone. We, and our kind, broke the consensus in Nebraska and nationally. All change begins with consensus breaking.
Why did it take so long? I used to say, “No universal draft” for peacenik reasons like Charlie Rangel’s. Now I go, almost every Monday, to my old duffers’ group. In another time, we would have sat around the pot-bellied stove in our bib overalls in the Podunk General Store, chewed, spit Copenhagen, and pontificated about the weather, the crops and the need for Free Silver. Now we meet at Perkins and eat eggbeaters and low-fat muffins. One of our duffers, just before the election, asked what would ever get the American people to oppose the war with authority. You know, people in the streets at nightfall, candles in hand, singing “How many roads?” marching on the Federal Building. (We still need that, you know, even after Nov. 7.) Another duffer opined, “Bring back the draft! This thing in Iraq wouldn’t last a month if we had a draft that fell on every mother’s son.” He may have been right. We need to think about the draft and justice for every mother’s son. Now the dying goes to rural people: white, African-American, Hispanic, Indian.
I too have supported a new universal draft on the basis of something like my duffer friend’s argument. Because of this, Roy Schoen, Vietnam vet and head of the Veterans Center in Lincoln, and I decided to debate the issue at the Annual Peace Conference. Roy argued for what Clinton had earlier proposed: a two-year national service including military training for persons wishing for such training and Peace Corps or Americorps-style work for peacebuilders. I, in contrast, argued for a full-fledged draft that would mobilize the American people... put the burden of war on those whose economic interests it serves. Ultimately, the group debate pretty largely came down on the side of Roy’s national service idea. The prevailing idea was that a draft could dangerously feed the Iraq War machine, while the decline in volunteerism when the military is short-handed would force us out. National service won the day, national service of a specific kind.
Though I was defeated in the debate, I raised good issues, the same ones that Rep. Rangel has raised. The children of the rural and poor are fighting the war. Forty-four percent of our recruits are rural while only 21 percent of America’s population are. Youths that live in the sparsely populated Zip Codes are 22 percent more likely to join the army than city kids. Major cities — the big ones — furnish 14 percent of our population, but only eight percent of our recruits. The hightech urban areas of the country furnish the lowest percent of all. Almost no children of the rich have gone to this war. Death rates in Iraq, in counties of over 1,000,000, are less than one half what they are in counties under 25,000.
The counties on which the deaths fall are disproportionately poor. The top 20 counties in percentages of population that go to Iraq are all lower-than-medianincome counties. In April of this year, Nebraska had experienced about 13 military deaths per million of its population, the fifth-highest state proportion of soldiers killed after four other rural states with high poverty levels: Arkansas, North Dakota, South Dakota and Vermont. Nebraska regularly has 1-6 of the poorest counties in America in the lists — all of them rural. While urban minorities are not suffering disproportionately in this war, African-American, Indian and Hispanic rural minorities are. For Hispanic legal immigrants, service and the risk of death has become a quick route to the frontline and, for those who survive, citizenship. Legal immigrants, given space in the military, ride quickly to death or citizenship — falsified green card holders the same thing. No cabinet people and almost no Congress members have sent children to this war. A few have signed up recently, especially the children of presidential candidates. Very few of the rich put their Isaacs on the Iraq altar.
Now we know one reason why politically we have had a national policy creating rural poverty. We need it to give us cannon fodder. The story is not new. The Johnny of “Johnny I hardly knew ye” is a rural Johnny from Athy in County Kildair:
Ye haven’t an arm, ye haven’t a leg,
hurroo, hurroo
Ye haven’t an arm, ye haven’t a leg,
hurroo, hurroo
Ye haven’t an arm, ye haven’t a leg,
Ye’re an armless, boneless, chickenless egg
Ye’ll have to put with a bowl out to beg
Oh Johnny I hardly knew ye.
Chorus:
With your guns and drums and drums and guns,
hurroo, hurroo
With your guns and drums and drums and guns,
hurroo, hurroo
With your guns and drums and drums and guns,
The enemy nearly slew ye
Oh my darling dear, Ye look so queer
Johnny I hardly knew ye.
Why does Washington always permit rural Nebraska to languish? Why does it give its meaningless salutes to the Johnnys this state has sent off to die or be mangled hurroo, hurroo? Rural Nebraska must ask whether neo-con Washington knows our state at all.
At the very least, this nation needs a universal national service, accompanied by a strict public analyses of where the burden of frontline activity and death fall — on which classes, races, rural or urban groups, governing or non-governing groups. The national service also needs quotas to assure that the burden falls equally on all classes, and especially on the children of people in Congress and in the upper levels of the administration. As we entered World War I, George Norris predicted that the war would not fall on the profiteering young men parented by Wall Street: “The volunteer officer, even the drafting officer, will not find them. They will be concealed in their palatial offices on Wall Street, sitting behind mahogany desks, covered up with clipped coupons, coupons soiled with the sweat of honest toil, coupons stained with mothers’ tears, coupons dyed in the lifeblood of their fellow men.” Norris’s Wall Street is now the government of Halliburton, the uniquely profitable oil companies, the Military Industrial Complex, the congress people elected by multi-million dollar purses. Let the debate about a draft and national service begin with Charlie Rangel’s bill.
