5:58 PM :: Stephen (contact)

What is the late November doing? Last spring, I attended a lecture series for several weeks on T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. I had read the poem for the first time in high school and again in college, after a class on the Divine Comedy, and had always found it worthy of study. My life has also followed Eliot's to some extent--like him, I came from St. Louis via Boston to Merton College, Oxford. (J. Alfred Prufrock was in fact the name of a St. Louis furniture store.) What impressed me about the series wasn't the lectures themselves--which were competently delivered and provided adequate background--but rather the experience of re-reading the poem seriously in order to prepare for them. It was something of a religious experience, far more so than any sermon I've heard in the last few years. I read the poem again recently, after another year of my life had elapsed, and was again moved by its attempt to answer intractable questions that so often go unmentioned. The second of the Quartets, "East Coker," begins with a commonplace yet arresting thought:

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

This attention to the inexorable passage of time, a concern inseparable from our own mortality, isn't something one encounters often in modern life. The idea of a memento mori has almost entirely disappeared from popular culture, in which we are young forever, and then disappear. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, of course (who wants to be reminded of death all the time?), but the truth is rather different. In such a context Eliot's opening reminder, "In my beginning is my end," becomes all the more powerful. Eliot turns back to his beginning, imagining the lives of his 16th-century forebears in his ancestral village of East Coker, before the long-dead Andrew Eliot departed for the New World:

... Round and round the fire
Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,
Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter
Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,
Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth
Mirth of those long since under earth
Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,
Keeping the rhythm in their dancing
As in their living in the living seasons
The time of the seasons and the constellations
The time of milking and the time of harvest
The time of the coupling of man and woman
And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.
Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

In one sense, Eliot was lucky, because his family tree could be traced back several hundred years; he knew his ancestors and knew what had happened to them. I know relatively little of my great-grandparents, and for all I know the villages where their great-grandparents lived no longer exist. But although Eliot may have been more aware of his roots than most, each of us, regardless of whether we have an 'ancestral village,' is tied to a cycle of which we are destined to play only one small part. In our beginnings, regardless of how disparate they may be, we find prefigured our end.

Reading Four Quartets reminded me of two passages in Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. Nietzsche, according to Bloom, had said that newspapers "had replaced the prayer in the life of the modern bourgeois"; the "busy, the cheap, the ephemeral, had usurped all that remained of the eternal in his daily life." Later on, Bloom writes that "On Sunday mornings educated men used to be harangued about death and eternity, made to give them a bit of attention. This is not a danger to be run in doing battle with the Sunday New York Times." When I first read the Quartets in high school, I had nowhere--except maybe in brief encounters with Ecclesiastes--encountered these thoughts so strikingly presented. Not even on the Rosh Hashanah after Sept. 11, when the traditional prayer of "U'Netaneh Tokef" ("who shall live and who shall die, ... who by water and who by fire") recalled the fragility of life, were they apparent; the crisis was not merely that life is fragile, moment to moment, but that it is short, and that it will end.

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.

What is one to do, faced with such inevitability? One possibility is despair; and despair can surely be found in Four Quartets, in Eliot's cry of "O dark dark dark," in his description in "The Dry Salvages" of the nihilistic "prayer of the bone on the beach." The final three Quartets were written during the darker days of World War II, when ordinary men and women had to wonder if fascism would triumph, and if civilization itself was soon for the pyre. (Are things so different now?) Moreover, Eliot wrote the poem when he was, as he put it, "in the middle way," and did not have much time left. His meditation on memory is clearly that of a man who feels his time has passed him by:

What is the late November doing
With the disturbance of the spring
And creatures of the summer heat,
And snowdrops writhing under feet
And hollyhocks that aim too high
Red into grey and tumble down
Late roses filled with early snow?

In the first poem of the four, "Burnt Norton," Eliot fears that his time is "unredeemable"; what might have been "is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility / Only in a world of speculation." A man who had been unhappily married until separating from his wife in 1933 (two years before composing "Burnt Norton"), Eliot imagines himself entering an Eden-like garden of missed possibilities, presented with the unbearable thought of the happiness he had missed:

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

Four Quartets was a terrible poem to read when young. There may be, as Eliot writes, "a time for the evening under starlight, / A time for the evening under lamplight / (The evening with the photograph album)"--the latter hasn't come for me yet, and hopefully won't for a long time. But the pain of Eliot's recollections can be felt even by those who haven't lived long enough to share them. Reading the poem, I'm forced to remind myself that I'm only in my twenties, that my mistakes (I dearly hope) are still to be made. But there are few lines more heartrending than those of the spirit of a teacher, often identified as W. B. Yates, who in the final poem of the Quartets appears to Eliot to impart the wisdom of age:

Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
   To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
   First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
   But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
   As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
   At human folly, and the laceration
   Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
   Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
   Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others' harm
   Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
   Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
   Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
   Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.'

It was in this refining fire that Eliot saw the possibility of redemption; he found his antidote to despair in Christianity and a Church that promised salvation. Yet even those who do not share Eliot's particular faith can share his conviction that despair and hope are often drawn from the same source. "The way upward and the way downward are the same," notes the epigraph. To face the inevitability of human error and still to strive for right action is a brave choice, and its bravery can be the ground of inspiration. It is impossible to read "The Dry Salvages" without hearing echoes of a Kantian view of free will, with its depiction of the moral act as an intersection of the noumenal and phenomenal worlds, as the only act that is truly free:

Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement—
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers. And right action is freedom
From past and future also.

There is a certain nobility in the struggle to act rightly, even when our eventual failure is assured. Such nobility would be entirely absent from our lives if we were angels and faced no temptation, if the victory were certain (who would fight for the inevitable revolution?), or, most importantly, if we were not mortal. Imagine what life would be like if our mortality were not guaranteed, if by avoiding risk and eating right we really could live forever. To put it lightly, when Braveheart said that "Every man dies," what if he had been wrong? Who among us would then be willing to undertake danger in a just cause? Would we compromise our own safety, and risk throwing away an infinite future, for the sake of a principle or of others we hold dear?

Our hopes, the Quartets tell us, start with the fact of our limitations. Our finite, imperfect, corrupted nature is where the struggle for life, perfection, and righteousness begins. It is only thus that we can move with Eliot away from despair, and from the predestination of our failure ("In my beginning is my end"). It is worth remembering that, having seen the "darkness into which they peered," Eliot concludes with a very different thought: "In my end," he writes, "is my beginning."

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years--
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate--but there is no competition--
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

 

7:19 AM :: Stephen (contact)

"Name That War": Nick Kristof announces the winners of his mock contest:

On the model of the War of Jenkins' Ear, one reader suggested "The War of Bush's Flight Suit." Harold Kramer of Massachusetts singlehandedly came up with "Rummy's Retreat," "Cheney's Chaos," "Perle's Predicament," "Powell's Problem" and "Rice's Regret."

Others came up with "King George's New Colony," "The War of the Roves" and "The War That Cried Wolfowitz."...

The five winners, each of whom gets a 250-dinar note left over from my last Iraq trip, are: Brad Corsello of New York for "Dubya Dubya III"; Richard Sanders for "Rolling Blunder"; John Fell of California for "Desert Slog," Will Hutchinson of Vermont for "Mess in Potamia"; and Willard Oriol of New York for "Blood, Baath and Beyond."

More seriously, during this holiday weekend, I hope we'll think often and appreciatively of those Americans who are in Iraq right now. Humor cannot erase their fear and loneliness in the face of Washington's policy failures, or the heartbreak here in so many homes where bereaved parents, spouses and orphans are struggling in this season to remember why they should be giving thanks.

What bothers me most isn't the bizarre change in tone of the last paragraph (what--it's poor taste to make fun of death and suffering?), but rather the easy assumption running throughout the column that nothing of good could possibly have been accomplished. The war as a whole was a complete mistake, leaving in its wake only blood and alliteration.

Looking back at my thoughts at this time a year ago, I don't know if I would have been strong enough in my moral commitment to support a war justified solely on humanitarian grounds. But at the very least, I now know that nightmares like these are no longer coming true. And as I've argued before, the process we're currently seeing--though it may be messy and deserving of criticism--is just about the best shot at democratization Iraqis could ever hope for.

Kristof's 250-dinar prizes, by the way, are being paid in old dinar notes--the ones with Saddam's picture on the front. (It's a collector's item, see? Like the old reichsmarks with the swastikas on them.) The new dinar, though, doesn't bear the image of the smiling dictator. Isn't that something worth being thankful for?

 

7:06 AM :: Stephen (contact)

A Thanksgiving Message: I didn't post anything on Thanksgiving--mainly because I was too busy cooking the sweet potatoes. But after a delightful "second seder" Thanksgiving with Patrick and Rachel Belton Friday night, I've thought of two more items to add to the list of what I'm thankful for.

First, as has been noted elsewhere, I'm grateful for the fact that only 36 years after Loving v. Virginia, the President can refer to himself and Condoleeza Rice as "look[ing] like a normal couple."

Second, I can't help but remember what Thanksgiving was like two years ago, when it seemed inevitable that more attacks would come, and when it seemed impossible that life in the U.S. would ever be the same. As a friend once pointed out to me, for the people whose job it is to listen to the "chatter" and wonder what to fear next, every day without another catastrophe is a great victory. And for these victories we should be thankful.

 

2:43 PM :: Stephen (contact)

One Year Later: It was one year ago today that this blog began, and 104 posts (and 49,283 words) later, I think it's gone pretty well. Compared to where I started, I'm a little bit older, hopefully a little bit wiser, and definitely a little bit less irrationally exuberant about the frequency of posting.

(As it turns out, it's my birthday as well as my blog's--and if only I weren't under the weather, I'd be out there partying like it's 1979.)

 

2:08 PM :: Stephen (contact)

No Hope for Eli: While I want to thank David Adesnik for his praise of my earlier posts, I must also take issue with his unprovoked attack on my former home. Let me just remind Mr. Adesnik that his own alma mater is hardly free of blemish; one need only examine its subservient nature, its obvious perversity, and its oft-proved inability to compete on the playing field...

 

2:07 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Sorry for the light posting: I've been ill for the past week, and I'm just now slowly returning to the land of the living. So if my writing seems to lack any of its usual grace, candor, and wit, just assume that it's the medication talking.

(I'm not kidding; these antibiotics list potential side effects of dizziness, loss of bearings, bad dreams, confusion, panicking, hallucinations, and "change in sense of reality" (!) In other words, this is the good stuff, man -- you can't buy this over the counter...)

 

1:30 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Thought for the day: I've been doing some reading on globalization recently, and came across some interesting thoughts on changes in communications. One of the most intriguing ways in which the Internet can change our lives is that it makes geographical closeness less necessary; an email takes no longer to reach Paris or Cape Town than it does to reach the room next door. The authors I read were more concerned with the implications for sovereignty -- "unbundling" the exercise of political power from territorial proximity, etc. -- but I kept wondering about the impact of communications on social relations. It's increasingly easy (and, perhaps, increasingly common) to have a circle of intimate friends spread across cities and continents, while hardly knowing your neighbors. This reminded me of the following passage from Marc Bloch's masterful Feudal Society, describing the flow of information in medieval Europe:

There was scarcely any remote little place that had not some contacts intermittently through that sort of continuous yet irregular ‘Brownian motion’ which affected the whole of society. On the other hand, between two inhabited centres quite close to each other the connections were much rarer, the isolation of their inhabitants infinitely greater than would be the case in our own day. If, according to the angle from which it is viewed, the civilization of feudal Europe appears sometimes remarkably universalist, sometimes particularist in the extreme, the principal source of this contradiction lay in the conditions of communication: conditions which favored the distant propagation of very general currents of influence as much as they discouraged, in any particular place, the standardizing effects of neighborly intercourse. (i, 64.)

It's somewhat eerie that Bloch's book, written half a century ago (he died a hero's death in 1944, shot by the Nazis for participating in the Resistance), would describe two of the most significant trends of our time: the steady integration of distant peoples and cultures into a global society, and the increasing fragmentation and tribalism that accompanies it. Or, to put it in cruder terms that I generally reject, "Jihad vs. McWorld."

(For more connections between medieval Europe and the Internet age, though, you'll just have to wait until I finish revising my thesis.)

 

9:51 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Home Sweet Home: Finally, something other than the draft. Next week, the mayor of St. Louis will be announcing a major anti-car-theft initiative for the city. This week, his car was stolen.

(One centerpiece of the initiative: leaving cars out on the street as "bait.")

 

9:37 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Selective Quotation, part III: Prof. Leiter updates his post as follows:

A reader asks: "Do you really think they made up the 20-year thing for the draft boards?" This took me by surprise. I wrote back: "The 20-year terms of draft board members isn't the issue, though I suppose it's worth noting that if board members started those term in 1981, it's a bit odd that it's only in late 2003 that the Defense Department is rushing to fill their slots. (Why not in 2001, or 2000 in anticipation?)

In my view, the 20-year term is precisely the issue, in that it undercuts any judgment that the Pentagon is actively "oiling up the draft machine" (to cite Lindorff's headline). It shows that there's a perfectly innocuous and far more plausible explanation for the call for draft board volunteers. And, as I've noted below, a quick Nexis search shows the defense department was trying to fill the slots "in 2001, or 2000 in anticipation."

Leiter continues:

But put that aside. The real question is who in their right mind assigns any credence to statements by Secretary of War Rumsfeld [as the department used to be called in more honest days] saying they won't reinstate a draft? Given the military staffing problems we're now confronting--which was the main point, I thought, of the Salon article--it seems plausible that the chicken hawks in the current administration are thinking about a draft as one alternative--after election day, of course. What was utterly childish about the posting in question was the quotation of governmental officials denying any such intent as though that were probative, conjoined with the failure to consider the logistical considerations that make a need for more men in uniform apparent. Even the absurd OxBlog folks are commenting on the need for more troops, confident, no doubt, that their blood won't be shed."

I suppose I should have been more clear in my initial post. There are two claims in Lindorff's article: first, that the Pentagon is anticipating a revival of the draft, as represented by its push to fill draft boards; and second, that regardless of the Pentagon's current plans, manpower requirements may force a draft in the near future. My main criticism of Lindorff in the two posts below was that he immediately assumed the first claim, when a much better explanation of the call for volunteers could have been discovered with a little research. This was clearly the most salient claim of the article (which, again, ran under the headline "Oiling up the draft machine?"), and it was this claim that was repeated by other newspapers and that created the media controversy. Moreover, without the evidence from local boards, nothing in Lindorff's article demonstrates a "willingness" on the part of the Pentagon to "tune up the draft machinery."

However, that still leaves the second claim, that the need for troops will force the Pentagon's hand. In assessing manpower requirements, I'll defer to those with more knowledge of military affairs, but I should note that the possibility of a draft strikes me as somewhat unlikely. If you remove from Lindorff's article all the discussion of "the draft machine," what's left are the opinions of four military experts, three of whom (Charles Peña and Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute, and Dartmouth professor Ned Lebow) think a draft is a likely possibility and one of whom (Rand analyst Beth Asch) disagrees. Yet there's no evidence that anyone with any pull at the Pentagon is in favor of such a move, even in light of the potential need for manpower. Lindorff recognizes that the military establishment is strongly opposed to a draft: "Most military officers understandably prefer an army of volunteers and career soldiers over an army of grudging conscripts; Rumsfeld, too, has long been a staunch advocate of an all-volunteer force." And a draft would go against everything Rumsfeld has ever said about the "revolution in military affairs," which seeks a leaner, meaner military with highly-trained soldiers using high-tech equipment.

Now, maybe future troop requirements will force the military to change its tune. But the evidence that Lindorff presents seems somewhat unconvincing. Even if Peña is right, and we'll need as many as 480,000 troops in Iraq, the U.S. was able to field a total of 540,000 troops over several months in 1990-91 without needing to revive the draft. Moreover, restoring the draft would be so unpalatable, both from a social and a military-effectiveness perspective, that the military can be expected to fully exhaust its other options before abandoning an all-volunteer force. While those options may seem unpleasant (extending tours of duty again, redeploying troops from Europe to other theaters, calling up more reservists, etc.), none of them are nearly so unpleasant as a draft. Nebow discounts the possibility of raising salaries to recruit new soldiers because it would increase the deficit, but I'm certain that the Bush administration, even after the election, would rather see a larger deficit than a return to conscription. (After all, they don't seem overly concerned about the deficit we've got now.) And surely "antagonizing that whole section of America that has family members who join the Reserves" is less of a concern than antagonizing everyone in America with a male friend or relative between 18 and 25.

Furthermore, it's not clear that the military would seek a revival of the draft even if we were unable to meet our need for troops. Rumsfeld's objection to the draft wasn't just that it's unpopular, but also that in today's military, the cost of training an unwilling conscript is greater than the benefit one extra soldier would bring. If this accurately reflects the opinions of our senior military planners, I'd expect that we're more likely to pull out of Iraq than to stay in at the cost of a draft.

That said, if Leiter or others can find good evidence that the military would be willing to entertain conscription as a solution to our manpower needs, I'd be happy to accept their judgment. But given that the only piece of evidence Lindorff and others had relied on was the call for draft board volunteers, it doesn't strike me as a significant concern.

UPDATE: The Selective Service System has added a disclaimer to its front page: "Selective Service continues to invite interested citizens to volunteer for service on its local boards that would decide claims from men if a draft were reestablished. This invitation for board members has been ongoing over the past 23 years, although there has not been a military draft in over 30 years. There is NO connection between this ongoing, routine public outreach to compensate for natural board attrition and current international events."

 

2:09 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Selective Quotation, part II: Prof. Brian Leiter of the University of Texas comments on the post below:

As all right-thinking folks know, governments never lie. And when they do, they can count on clever Americans in Oxford to cover their tracks.

Point taken. When I was told about the 20-year terms for draft board members by Selective Service public affairs specialist Dan Amon, I had no guarantee that he was telling the truth. So how good is the evidence that he's lying? Let's look to Lexis, and my own hometown paper:

St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)
December 3, 2000, Sunday, FIVE STAR LIFT EDITION
SECTION: METRO, Pg. D8
LENGTH: 1375 words
HEADLINE: DRAFT BOARDS FACE AN EXODUS OF MEMBERS IN THE YEAR AHEAD; TERMS OF THOSE APPOINTED IN 1981 ARE SET TO EXPIRE

BYLINE: William Lamb; Of The Post-Dispatch

BODY:
The nation's draft boards, including 20 in the St. Louis area, are still on the lookout for recruits more than 25 years after the draft was suspended.

But it's not battle-ready young men they're after these days. It's draft board members - volunteers whose job it would be to weigh deferments for inductees if a crisis were to prompt Congress and the president to resurrect the draft.

Selective Service officers say it can be hard to staff boards that most Americans believe no longer exist. Next year, they will face the added challenge of filling 3,300 or so seats, including about 18 in the St. Louis area.

The vacancies are coming up because of a law limiting board members to 20-year terms. President Jimmy Carter signed the law when he reinstated Sel ective Service registration in 1980 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. About a third of the nation's 9,900 board members were among the first appointments in 1981.

Area Selective Service administrators say they have been preparing for the wave of retirements and have already started drawing from a network of current board members and local civic groups to find replacements.

Note that this article was published while Clinton was still in office. See also the Rochester (N.Y.) Chronicle and Democrat of July 2, 2001:

After a hiatus in the 1970s, President Jimmy Carter ordered the boards to re-form in 1980 to be prepared in case of war.

Because of a 20-year term limit, turnover is expected to be greatest in the next couple of years. Between 2001 and 2002, 25 percent of the country's 2,300 local board members are expected to retire, said Alyce Teel-Burton, a spokeswoman for the Selective Service System.

In other words, if the government is lying about the 20-year term statistic, they've been doing it for a remarkably long time. Other references to the Selective Service's search for draft board volunteers can be found in the Courier News (Bridgewater, N.J.) (March 2, 2001); the Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat (Aug. 6, 2001), the Hartford Courant (Nov. 4, 2002), the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer (Dec. 10, 2002), the Tulsa World (Feb. 12, 2003), the Bergen County (N.J.) Record (Feb. 16, 2003), etc.

At this point, any claim that the recruitment drive is related to troop needs in Iraq--or anything having to do with the Bush administration, actually--strikes me as woefully implausible. All of these articles should have been easily accessible to a reporter trying to verify the government's claims. So unless Leiter is next going to accuse the government of hacking Lexis, I'm willing to give Amon the benefit of the doubt.

UPDATE: The blog "Federal Review" noted last week that the October 2000 version of the Selective Service's "local boards" page is almost exactly the same as the current version. In fact, there are similar pages from August 2000 and even July 1997, though they lack an online application form.

UPDATE: See further post above.

 

9:15 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Selective Quotation: Thursday's Harvard Crimson contains some of the most surprising news I'd seen in a while: that the Pentagon is planning to revive the draft. In the lead editorial, headlined Draft Strategy, Not Youth, the editors announce:

For the first time in decades, the Pentagon has begun to lay the groundwork for a potential return of the draft--at least according to a page discovered last week on the Defense Department’s web site...

The obscure Defense Department page, which has since been deleted [Google cache here --ed.], was an announcement of an effort to recruit new members to fill the many vacant seats on community draft boards nationwide--boards that have sat by idly with no function since the end of the Vietnam War. "Serve Your Community and the Nation," the announcement urged, "If a military draft becomes necessary, approximately 2,000 Local and Appeal Boards throughout America would decide which young men... receive deferments, postponements or exemptions from military service."

The editors go on to link the "Pentagon's actions" to "the glaring urgency of the situation in Iraq"; with the troop levels in Iraq so "grossly inadequate," the military was clearly preparing to start calling lottery numbers and shipping our youth to Baghdad.

The reason the editorial surprised me--well, one reason--was that the only people in Washington who've expressed any interest in the draft are Democrats, such as Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-S.C.). Their proposal was publicly belittled in January by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. ("We're not going to reimplement a draft. There is no need for it at all.") In fact, as is typical for Rumsfeld, his remarks were so harsh that he was subsequently forced to apologize. I was also surprised because reinstating the draft would take an act of Congress, which is pretty much impossible to imagine.

So I checked it out, and called Dan Amon, a public affairs specialist with the Selective Service (703-605-4100). It turns out that the current system of local boards was established in 1979, and many individuals had volunteered for 20-year terms. As a result, the military faced a number of vacancies at the turn of the century, which it's tried in the intervening years to fill. The same thing was reported by the Associated Press, which notes that "hiring replacements has been going on for several years."

Although the Selective Service System wasn't responsible for placing the ad, the site in question (DefendAmerica.mil) contains links to a number of different volunteer opportunities, like the Red Cross and the Coast Guard Auxiliary. Whoever posted the notice undoubtedly wanted to help out by circulating the application to volunteer.

But that's not how it looked to freelancer Dave Lindorff, who started the media furor with a Nov. 3 piece in Salon entitled "Oiling up the draft machine?" On "an obscure federal Website devoted to the war on terrorism," Lindorff reports, "the Bush administration quietly began a public campaign to bring the draft boards back to life." Lindorff portrays the draft as the natural response to troop requirements in Iraq, as well as potential future conflicts in Syria, Iran, and North Korea. Although he cites the Pentagon's complete denial that a draft is on the way, Lindorff replaces their language with his own, far more suspicious, formulation: "Recognizing that even the mention of a draft in the months before an election might be politically explosive, the Pentagon last week was adamant that the drive to staff up the draft boards is not a portent of things to come." (Question: isn't this a statement of fact, that the military recognizes the political explosiveness of a pre-election draft? And if Lindorff didn't get a quote from the Pentagon mentioning the election, isn't he just lying?)

Lindorff's piece is a study in how to generate ominous clouds of doubt from even the most mind-numbingly obvious set of facts. For instance, he emphasizes the uniqueness of the recruitment drive, writing that "Not since the early days of the Reagan administration in 1981 has the Defense Department made a push to fill all 10,350 draft board positions and 11,070 appeals board slots." Hmm, that must mean that the administration is really serious about restarting the draft, huh? Or maybe it just means that they only started filling the boards in 1979. No wonder they haven't needed to fill them since Reagan--most people serve for 20-year terms!

Why does the 20-year statistic never appear in Lindorff's article? Since Lindorff obviously spoke to Amon (incorporating a bland quote as the last line of the story), I can't imagine he heard anything different from what Amon told me. Or maybe Lindorff just decided to leave out that snippet of inconvenient information. Far be it from me to accuse Lindorff of political bias--but then again, I've never begun an essay by asking "Is George W. Bush another Hitler?" (His answer: "George Bush is not Hitler. Yet.")

After the publication of Lindorff's article, the pseudo-story was picked up by the Guardian (natch), the Toronto Star (reinterviewing Lindorff's sources without attribution), the Age (Australia), the Oregonian, the Hamilton (Ontario) Spectator (no link), the Chicago Daily Herald, and PBS's "NOW" with Bill Moyers, before the AP finally stepped in to settle the dispute. (The Crimson, alas, jumped in three days later.) The draft myth has also got a strong Internet following--see here, here, here--and has even inspired a truly awful poem on Counterpunch (yes, the same publication where Lindorff's Bush-Hitler piece appeared).

It's a sad testimony to the current state of mass media, when an Internet rumor spread by politically-motivated journalists can become accepted fact without even the slightest suspicion. It's like a game of telephone; errors are passed from story to story without anyone checking to see where they came from. (Many of the print articles followed the Guardian to the letter, reporting that the boards were 84 percent vacant instead of 84 percent full.) It's especially sad when one phone call could have clarified the entire thing. For crying out loud, people! One phone call!

It also testifies to the growing influence of a perpetual-conspiracy mindset, in which the government's next move can only be revealed on an "obscure federal Web site." To someone like Lindorff, American military policy is always better represented by random pages on semi-official PR websites than by explicit and repeated statements from everyone who occupies any position of authority. The fact that the page was deleted must mean that the story was true, not that the website's operators realized it was being grossly misinterpreted and decided to take it down. (Question: if the Bush administration needs to fill the draft boards before moving forward with its evil plan, wouldn't taking down the page mean that the campaign is over?)

I've written about this conspiracy mentality before, but it's frustrating to see it so widespread. It reminds me of the Guardian's "Wolfowitz said it's about oil" fiasco; reporters heard a story that confirmed their political worldviews, and they ran with it without pausing to find out whether it was true. Newspapers have vast resources and teams of dedicated reporters; they should never be missing facts available to anyone with an Internet connection and a telephone. But no one has time to make the call before rushing to publication--especially when the story's as juicy as a return to the draft.

UPDATE: See post above.

 

1:10 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Don't Ask, Don't Receive: I've been following the lawsuit filed by a group of Yale Law students over the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. Many schools, Yale Law included, had restricted the military's recruiting efforts on campus under a policy of non-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The students are challenging military regulations under the Solomon Amendment, a law conditioning universities' federal funding on access for military recruiters. According to the Yale students' complaint (PDF), they chose to be part of an association that rejects discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and forcing the school to compromise that message violates their rights of "expressive association, freedom of speech, freedom of association in pursuit of common objectives and freedom of intimate association."

In my opinion, the real question here is one of statutory interpretation. The Solomon Amendment required that universities provide "access" to military recruiters, not necessarily that they provide the same level of access to the military recruiters as they do to corporate recruiters (as the Pentagon sees it). (I can't find a copy of the most recent text online, but an older version of the law--which has since been amended--is available here.) As one judge noted in response to a similar lawsuit (PDF 1, PDF 2), it's not clear "how the statute requires absolute parity when all that it requires is that a school not 'prohibit' or 'in effect prevent' military recruiting efforts."

The Yale students also argue that the statute should only affect funding to Yale Law School, not all of Yale University. But the language of subsection (b) seems to read differently (at least in the 2002 version of the law):

No funds [as described later in the amendment] may be provided by contract or by grant (including a grant of funds to be available for student aid) to an institution of higher education (including any subelement of such institution) if the Secretary of Defense determines that that institution (or any subelement of that institution) has a policy or practice (regardless of when implemented) that either prohibits, or in effect prevents ..."

The "including" parentheticals are clearly meant to expand, rather than restrict, the scope of the limitation. If the instutition or any subelement blocks access, then the whole institution (including all subelements) gets shut out.

The focus of much of the attention, however, has been another claim--that the Solomon Amendment violates students' and universities' freedom of association. Without expressing any opinion on the merits of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" or the universities' choice to restrict recruiting, I'm not sure I buy this argument. The government places conditions on federal funding all the time. For instance, a Catholic church group has a constitutional right to accept only Catholics as members, or to proselytize and try to convert people to Catholicism. That's part of their First Amendment freedoms; if the government tried to take it away, it would be violating their rights. But if the government didn't want to fund the church group because it proselytizes or discriminates on the basis of religion, no one would say that it's violating the church group's rights--they don't have a right to federal funding. (In fact, many people on the left have tried to argue that school vouchers are unconstitutional because they might send government money to religious schools; the schools' First Amendment right to be religious doesn't guarantee them access to taxpayer money.)

There might be limits on how Congress can use the spending power--they can't require federally funded groups to vote Republican or swear loyalty oaths. But there's a difference between specifically subsidizing or penalizing speech, and trying to forward other legitimate government interests (like a well-functioning military) that happen to impinge on a particular group's viewpoint. So my guess is that the statute itself will survive judicial scrutiny, but perhaps not the Pentagon's current interpretation of it.

(Another interesting issue is posed by the Amendment's exception for schools with a longstanding tradition of religious pacifism. Could a school with a longstanding tradition of secular pacifism sue for equal treatment? And isn't the government discriminating among viewpoints by making exceptions for pacifists but not others? But these arguments seems similar to those surrounding conscientious objectors--whether objectors can rely on secular or only religious principles of pacifiism, and whether they have to be longstanding pacifists or merely opposed to the particular war for which they're drafted--and there's no reason to expect it to be different when it comes to school funding.)

 

6:29 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Report from the Union: I got back a little while ago from hearing Josh Chafetz speak at the Oxford Union opposing the resolution "This House believes we are losing the peace." I'm sure that Josh will be too modest to mention this on his own site, but one of the speakers in favor of the resolution, Tam Dalyell MP, described Josh's speech as the best prepared speech he had heard at the Union in 17 appearances there.

(Of course, Dalyell also repeated false claims that Saddam was not responsible for Halabja and described the Gulf War as a reaction to insults from the Kuwaiti government, while his colleage Jeremy Corbyn MP spoke of the dangerous policies of Perle and Vulfervitz. But that was all to be expected.)

 

12:45 PM :: Stephen (contact)

The Gender Genie: So, I finally caved, and following the lead of Andrew Sullivan, Instapundit, and the curiously-gendered NZPols, I ran my blog's front page (minus this post, of course) through the Gender Genie:

Female Score: 5824
Male Score: 13876

For comparison, I ran another test on a random sample entry by my good friend Steve Wu, and came up with the following result:

Female Score: 278
Male Score: 120

Well, it's only a computer; what could they know?

 

5:58 AM :: Stephen (contact)

A Call for Violence. Another judge died on Tuesday. Ismail Yussef Saddek was gunned down at 7:30 a.m. in front of his house, and died before he could reach the hospital. He was killed because he was a member of a commission documenting human rights violations under the Ba'athist regime. The previous day, Judge Muhan Jabr al-Shuwaili, the head of a similar commission in Najaf, was kidnapped and executed by unknown assailants. He was shot twice in the head at point-blank range, after being told that "Saddam has ordered your prosecution."

For some, these brutal murders serve as a reason to bring the troops home. For others, they serve as reason to send more troops, or to build up the Iraqi police, or to bring in the U.N., or virtually any other change in policy. But what they cannot do, or at least cannot do morally, is serve as reason to rejoice.

Yet that seems to be the reaction encouraged by the outspoken and Oxford-educated writer Tariq Ali. On the same day as Al-Shuwaili's assassination, Ali published an op-ed in the Guardian praising the "resistance" as the "first step towards Iraqi independence." Rather than condemn the campaign of violence that has killed so many Coalition soldiers and innocent civilians, Ali says that Iraqis "can be proud" of their opposition to imperial occupiers.

Ali makes no secret of his hope that the Coalition will be driven out of Iraq by further violence. Nor does he limit this hope to attacks on military personnel. Not once in the Guardian op-ed does he express the slightest regret at the murder of so many humanitarian workers, whether at the U.N. or the Red Cross, whose only aim in Iraq was to help civilians rebuild their country (and many of whom were themselves Iraqi). Indeed, Ali specifically cautions against such judgmental behavior on the part of the West:

"Nor does it behove western commentators whose countries are occupying Iraq to lay down conditions for those opposing it. It is an ugly occupation, and this determines the response."

How ephemeral now seems all the concern about the conduct of a "just war." Would "no targeting humanitarian workers" not be an acceptable condition, Tariq? How about "no murdering human rights investigators," or just "no killing your own innocent countrymen"? Is the obscenity of loading an ambulance with explosives, specifically to kill medical volunteers, no longer beyond the bounds of conscience?

No, for Ali, there is nothing that cannot be done to the Iraqi "puppets," "quislings," and "jackals" who have cooperated with the occupation--not even murder. Back in May, in another Guardian op-ed, Ali hoped "that the invaders of Iraq will eventually be harried out of the country by a growing national reaction to the occupation regime they install, and that their collaborators may meet the fate of former Iraqi prime minister Nuri Said before them." (As Ian Buruma notes, "Nuri Said, lest people forget, was a pro-western leader, under whose rule Iraq was relatively calm and prosperous. He was murdered in a military coup in 1958.")

On September 20, Ali apparently got his wish, when one of the three women on the Iraqi Governing Council, Aquila al-Hashimi, was gunned down outside her Baghdad home. She died of her wounds five days later, and thousands attended her funeral. The presence of women on the Governing Council had been widely praised as a move towards progressive governance; yet one wonders whether in Ali's mind, as one of the leading "collaborators," al-Hashimi deserved her fate.

It is difficult to reconcile Ali's frequent protestations of liberal ideals with his fierce wish that they be won through blood and fire. In October 2002, he told Al-Ahram that "[w]hat people in the Arab world need is democracy"; on Monday, he repeated his hope that "[w]hen Iraq's people regain control of their own destiny" they will choose policies that "combine democracy and social justice." Yet who are these crusaders for equality, who seek freedom by killing volunteers for the Red Cross? According to Ali, they include Ba'athists, dissident communists, former members of the Iraqi army, and members of Sunni and Shia religious groups. Fascists, communists, fundamentalists, and the military--these are the idealists who, for Ali, will usher in a new age of democracy and social justice in Iraq. Only in Ali's fantasyland would these groups shed their authoritarian aspirations as soon as they achieve power, or would those who have used rape and torture as routine instruments of state policy take up the cause of the people. Would not a government formed under U.S. auspices, even one required to adopt a pro-Western tilt, be far, far more likely to bring democracy and social justice than this gang of would-be and have-been tyrants?

Ali's bizarre self-delusion would be merely annoying, rather than abhorrent, if only so many people weren't dying in the meantime. It is worth asking who benefits from the terrible violence Ali urges. The Iraqi people have suffered much during the occupation, but they have suffered most from the lack of security, a crisis brought on by nothing other than the very "resistance" whose cause Ali trumpets. The "mass unemployment" he decries, the lack of "basic amenities," the importation of foreign workers by occuping troops (who "can't even trust the Iraqis to clean their barracks")--these are all direct consequences of lawless violence by those who prefer the glory of destruction to the difficult work of rebuilding. Those sabotaging electric lines or oil pipes--or the foreign fighters who are, Ali assures us, merely "crossing the border to help"--are not the authentic voice of the Iraqi people, but their oppressors. As Thomas L. Friedman has written, they are not the Iraqi Viet Cong, but the Iraqi Khmer Rouge.

How could Ali have become so convinced of the opposite--that those working hardest to thwart Iraqi democracy are in fact its best hope? Perhaps he is in the grip of an outdated narrative. Perhaps he is frustrated that the easy, morally less-ambiguous decolonization of his student days is now over, and insists on replaying that formative drama even when the characters have worn thin. U.S.-occupied Iraq is not the Belgian Congo, and the thugs who killed Ms. al-Hashimi are neither Gandhi nor Nelson Mandela.

Ali, however, has apparently grown very good at selective blindness. In a fawning BBC profile, he stated that
"capitalist politics" had become "increasingly authoritarian, designed not to wipe out, perhaps, but completely to marginalise dissenting voices." Yet for the members of the glorious resistance who marginalize dissenters with two bullets to the head, Ali has nary a word of discouragement.

Luckliy, Ali's views are not shared by many respectable voices in world politics. Many of those who want to end the occupation, or at least revise it dramatically, still view it as a tragedy when each coalition soldier and each Iraqi is killed. Though they criticize the coalition and the new Iraqi leadership, they still recognize them as participants in a struggle for the future of Iraqi society--a struggle in which many brave men and women, like Aquila al-Hashimi and Judge Ismail Yussef Saddek, have died. But Tariq Ali doesn't find it necessary to pause for a moment and mourn their loss. Instead, he's calling for more.


(Original link courtesy of Andrew Sullivan.)

 

7:51 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Damn Yankee: When it comes to the Confederate flag, Howard Dean seems to have a rare talent for repeatedly putting his foot in his mouth:

"It's a racist symbol but I also think the Democratic Party has to be a big tent," Dean said Tuesday night. "Poor white people need to vote their economic interest."

In other words, we need more racists in the Democratic Party. Also, poor white people in the South are mostly racists.

Is this really the best way to get poor white Southerners to vote for you? And if Dean's still going for the Confederate-flag vote, was it such a good idea to describe himself as a metrosexual?

 

10:54 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Union Yes? Josh Chafetz argues that there's "nothing un-conservative about supporting a union." For my part, I don't consider myself a conservative, and I'm not sure what to think about unions. But I'm also not sure I can agree with Josh's rationale:

[W]hen unions are engaged in organizing workers and bargaining for a better deal for their members -- including when they're on strike -- they're just a voluntary organization pursuing a mutual interest. In that capacity, they're just another of Tocqueville's intermediate social institutions.

Imagine an association of individuals who are clearly not fellow employees (say, an independent fishermen's association) which acts like a union, bargaining collectively to get a better deal for its members. In one sense, it's a "voluntary organization pursuing a mutual interest." But in another, it's nothing more than a cartel trying to corner the fish market. For some reason, it's hard to see an association of Sotheby's and Christie's as merely an "intermediate social institution."

So the real question to answer is, what is it about the relationship of employment that makes unions legitimate? There are plenty of different answers to this question, and they prescribe different sets of union regulations--deciding whether specific tactics, like sitdown strikes, or specific goals, like secondary or political strikes, are legitimate. But these answers don't seem to have their roots in a particular vision of a healthy civil society, but rather in particular conceptions of fair dealing and contractual obligation. The real question ought to be one of rights and their enforcement, rather than voluntary association. Otherwise, I know of another intermediate social institution Tocqueville might not have approved of...

 

1:06 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Oh, the Perks: The great thing about being a Supreme Court justice is, whenever you get tired of sitting on the bench, you can always go riding on elephants...



Justice Scalia and Justice Ginsburg in Jaipur, India, February 1994.

(Thanks to Josh Chafetz for the link.)