All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, introducing Edward Hasbrook.
He is a regular contributor on the blog at antiwar.com, where he covers issues concerning the draft in America, which is not all the way over yet.
And he maintains the website resistors.info and publishes the Resistance News newsletter.
And back in the 1980s, he actually went to prison like a hero for resistance to draft registration.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Edward?
Thank you for having me on, Scott.
Great to have you here.
And so let's start with that.
Tell us the story of what you were doing that was so great that they put you in prison over it here when it comes to this issue.
Well, you know, I've been I've been reading enough already.
And when you think about the story you tell in your book about the long history of the forever wars, you start in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet intervention, Soviet-backed coup in Afghanistan.
Well, that was actually the start of the present draft registration program, which continues today.
It was enacted into law during the so-called hostage crisis over the takeover of the American embassy in Tehran during the 1980 campaign.
And it was during a period of national trauma.
You know, the the Iranian Revolution, the hostage crisis, what that was a crisis for was a crisis for the American sense of impunity.
You know, Americans had assumed that whatever kind of role the American military played around the world, it would never be blowback that would actually affect Americans, that we could pick our wars, that they wouldn't come to us.
And so it was part of the response in that panicked moment that in many ways was a precursor for the kind of national trauma and panic and demonization of Islam and so forth that characterized the period after 9-11 when the Patriot Act was enacted.
And in many ways, it was an effort by the Carterites to appease critics from their right, including, you know, Ronald Reagan as a candidate who were who were criticizing Carter for not being harsh enough on Iran and Afghanistan.
So the ostensible reason for Carter proposing reinstatement of draft registration in 1980, which was seized upon by those who had never accepted limitations on military power and constraints after Vietnam and wanted to move back to a period of increased American projection of force, the ostensible excuse was to respond to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
So when I was ordered to register for the draft in 1980, it was to indicate my willingness to be sent to fight if the U.S. sent American troops to fight on the side of, well, who?
I've told this story, to fight on the side of the people who the Soviets called Basmachi and their supporters called Mujahideen and who would later come to call themselves, some of them, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
So the U.S. government put me in prison for refusing to agree to fight on the side of the people who would eventually become the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, which is about all you need to know about how wrongheaded the whole idea of draft registration and the idea that American young people should sign over to the government the right to decide for them which wars we should be fighting, where, when, and on which side we should be fighting and trust the government to make those decisions correctly, which I think you know as well as anybody else that the historical lesson in the next 40 years is that the U.S. government has gotten almost everything wrong in those decisions.
Wow, that's really interesting.
So I guess, first of all, I never knew, but I would have guessed, Edward, probably that the selective service system such as it is was sort of what was left after Nixon abolished the draft, that he didn't really abolish it.
He just left us with this thing.
But I guess I'm filling in the gap here with my imagination.
But it sounds like what you're saying is, no, Nixon really did abolish it.
And then Jimmy Carter brought it back halfway.
In other words, he didn't start conscripting people and sending them to war, but he demanded, and Pat signed a law demanding that people make themselves available for just such an eventuality anyway.
Exactly.
There was still only the counterrevolution against the great Richard Nixon who had abolished the draft.
How do you like that?
Well, you know, even at the time, there was dispute within both parties.
There were still some liberal Democrats who opposed bringing back the draft, who did remember Vietnam.
And there were also, you know, as it went into the Reagan administration, and this was this was something it was brought back under Carter.
But then the decision as to whether to continue it fell to Reagan early in his administration.
And there was a heated debate even within the White House.
You had White House advisers who came from the more libertarian wing of the Reagan revolution who were strongly opposed to the draft and wanted to get rid of it.
Ultimately, they lost out to the hawks who were like, no, let's seize this opportunity to move forward to put in place a mechanism that enables us to think about war without limits, because that's really what the draft is about.
You know, they will say, and it's true, we don't want a draft, but they assume it's probably not even plan B, but maybe plan F for fallback after active duty troops, the reserves, the National Guard, proxy war waged by our allies, mercenaries or security contractors.
Only if all that runs out would they turn to the draft.
But the assumption ever since of military planners has been, well, we don't have to think about running out of troops because if things go too far, we can always turn to the draft.
We have that as an option.
And this I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself, but this is why ending draft registration is so important, not just because the draft itself is wrong, which it is, but because the draft enables military planners to think without restraints.
It's what enables them to imagine that they can wage unlimited wars around the world forever.
And well, we always have this fallback available.
Ending draft registration and forcing an admission that draft registration has failed, which we can get to how it's failed.
And I was very proud to have been part of making it fail.
But forcing an admission from the government that draft registration has failed, the draft is not an option, whether they like it or not.
It's not an option because people won't go.
Right.
Forcing that admission is a way to begin to impose constraints on war.
And again, as you know, Scott, it's been very difficult for the people to constrain war making.
This is a place where we have an opportunity to do that.
Yeah.
Well, and in multiple ways to write in, in the literal sense and very much in the figurative sense in terms of sending the message of where we all are on this.
But I'm so glad that you said that because I think this is the worst thing that we have going for us.
I'm sure you've had to argue this point a million times over that we need a draft because I guess they hadn't thought about the part that you're implying about that.
Yeah.
An unlimited supply of infantry lowers the cost of intervention for the officers.
I mean, this is come on, think straight.
But instead, people fall back on this myth from Vietnam that, well, you know, it was the draft that ended the Vietnam War.
And there's, of course, a kernel of truth to this, that they kept changing the draft rules to where richer and richer people were being drafted.
And so that became a real problem because now you had the sons of people with actual political class influence who had their sons coming home in coffins.
And you had the veterans, of course, helping to lead major factions of the anti-war movement as well.
And then so that helped to pressure again Nixon to pull those troops out of there after he had escalated the war for, what, three or four years already by the time he started drawing them down.
And, of course, the draft had enabled everybody from from really Truman on, right, from Truman through Eisenhower, Kennedy and and then Johnson and Nixon and ultimately Gerald Ford, I guess, finally oversaw the very end of the thing, enabled that whole thing to happen in the first place.
And it took all those years.
And then that was finally the only resort that we had, that pressure built up from upper middle class moms crying about it.
And then and then people just say, as a matter of course, that, of course, that's what we have to resort to now.
We need to have a draft now.
It's the only way to get the American people to actually care about this stuff is to enslave their sons and daughters, maybe now to go and force them to get blown up in the Helmand province.
Not that they did anything to deserve it and to kill people while they're there and then die trying and then lose anyway, because that's what it'll take to get Republican and Democrat families to use their influence to make the government finally back down.
And so then you're just saying that's right.
The argument that's made.
Yeah, that's an argument that's made.
But, you know, I think you kind of imply what's wrong with that.
But let me let me make it clear here in at least two ways.
One is that the draft enabled a much longer war.
And I was actually at a very interesting talk by Daniel Ellsberg a couple of years ago where he was asked about this.
And he said, well, if we'd had a draft in recent years, if they'd actually been able to move beyond registration, which is what they hoped in 1980, you know, we've had this stalemate for 40 years where registration failed.
There was no face saving way to end it.
But they couldn't they knew they couldn't actually move to a draft.
But if we'd actually had a draft in recent years that, you know, he says we'd have seen much larger scale interventions even than we have.
And certainly the draft didn't didn't prevent it eventually contributed to an end to the Vietnam War, but not until millions had died.
But the other thing is, you know, with respect to this argument, that we should threaten the children of people in power with the draft in order to influence their parents' behavior.
That is a morally repugnant argument.
It is ethically tantamount to saying we should kidnap the children of the rich and hold them hostage and threaten to kill them and try to ransom them to their parents for peace.
And it inflicts on those young people who are not the ones who sent us into war, their parents and other older people's errors in making those wars in the first place.
So that argument really only repeats and exemplifies the ageism, the contempt for the lives of the young and the idea that old people know better than young which wars we should be fighting.
It exemplifies the ageism that underlies the draft in the first place, which never applies to everybody.
Even if it were expanded to young women as well as young men, it would still only be the young.
Why only them?
Because ageism.
Well, isn't it partly because I mean, I've always thought that, you know what, a 23 year old can be just as effective as a warrior as an 18 year old.
It's not like it's all downhill from 19 or something.
The reason they focus on the 17 and 18 year olds is because they don't know anything except what they've learned in government school all alone, which is when you put on olive green, you're always fighting Hitler and you're always on the side of right.
And so it's fine.
And you go straight from the football team to the infantry.
And there's a there's a there's a conditioning process that transition them from parental authority to school authority to military authority.
Once people are on their own as adults and are more empowered and more confident about their own agency, there's going to be much more resistance if you try and round those people up.
So it's it's it's it is in a way taking, you know, the people who the government thinks it can get away with enslaving first.
But the good thing is it didn't work.
And that's I think the other piece of this story is what happened in 1980.
There had been a five year hiatus when people didn't even have to register for the draft.
OK, the draft boards have been abolished.
They've been brought back, by the way.
There's a draft board in every county in the country.
And we recently got in response to a Freedom Information Act request for the first time the list of all of those.
So you can look on our website at Resisters.info.
You can see who are the people who are going to be deciding who to send off to kill or be killed if there's a draft in your county.
And you can go question them.
But anyway, they had gotten rid of all of that for five years, from 75 to 80.
And there'd really been a sea change in people's attitudes.
People were not taking this for granted.
And there were predictions made even in 1980.
Those who looked at it said, you know, you're going to have a hard time getting people to go along with this.
And that proved to be true.
Far more people just ignored the registration requirement than the government had had planned for, which is part of why it got punted into the Reagan administration to figure out what do we do?
And what they eventually decided to do, not because they liked it, but because they really couldn't do anything else with a million non-registrants.
They couldn't prosecute them all.
And besides, in order to prosecute somebody, they had to prove that they knew that they were supposed to register.
So it was going to be a tedious process where they had to send the FBI to give them a notice and tell them register or else.
And only then, if they didn't sign up, would they be able to prosecute them.
So the only people they had a chance at were public outspoken organizers.
So they decided, well, we'll try to go after a few of the ringleaders and maybe that will scare everybody into registering.
So they actually picked out what they believe, what they considered would be the most vocal non-registrants.
They indicted 20 of us and most of us were convicted.
I mean, there really wasn't any issue.
We were people who had publicly spoken out, had written letters to the government, who said we were supposed to register and we're not going to.
So convicting was never, never an issue.
But what that did was it called attention to the scale of the resistance.
It reassured people that there was safety in numbers and that there was a degree of safety in silence, that if you didn't speak out, you were at no risk.
And so registration rates actually went down thereafter.
And so within a few years, by the late 1980s, the Department of Justice, as we've later, much, much later, we got statements from officials about this and know what happened.
By 1988, the Department of Justice told the Selective Service system, this is a waste of time.
It's not working.
We're not going to investigate any more of these cases.
So what's happened for the 30 years since then is that every year, Selective Service turns over a list of several hundred thousand names of people who they've gotten from other lists, but who don't show up in the Selective Service registration database.
They turn these lists over to the Department of Justice and the Department of Justice sends them to the circular file and does nothing with them.
Now, they have brought in some administrative penalties until recently.
And actually, still, you can't get federal student aid if you haven't registered, although Congress recently voted to rescind that.
The change hasn't taken effect, but starting in 2023, you'll be able once again to get federal student aid, even if you didn't register for the draft.
Many states have taken this on at the instigation of Selective Service.
And so in many states, you have to register in order to get a driver's license, although not in California or a number of other significant states, but even California would be significant enough in itself.
So most people don't register unless it's required for some other program.
The other thing is that the whole point of having the registration list is to, for one and only purpose, it's to send out induction notices if there's a draft.
And I have to send those out by certified mail so that they can prove you got them.
So what matters is an accurate postal address.
Well, it probably comes as a surprise to most listeners and to you, Scott, that men are supposed to tell the Selective Service system every time they move, every time they change their address until they turn age 26.
Nobody does.
And, you know, there hasn't been an audit since the 1980s of the Selective Service database.
But even within a couple of years of setting it up for the first time, they found that the majority of the addresses were out of date.
So if they started trying to draft people, most of the most of the induction notices would come back as undeliverable.
The percentage of people who actually have kept up to date and have an accurate address so that they could be drafted, which is the point of the system, is very, very small.
And even two years ago, when the National Commission on Military Service was looking into what to do about Selective Service, the former director of Selective Service who set up the current system in 1980, Bernie Rosker, came out of retirement to testify that at this point the database is so incomplete and inaccurate that it would be, in his words, less than useless for an actual draft.
But they haven't wanted to end registration in spite of that manifest failure, because to end it would be an admission that they need to scale back their war making to be limited to the wars that people are actually willing to fight.
And that would mean a real change in American war policy.
Yeah, or I mean, at least they have to give the soldiers big raises.
So here the Selective Services Repeal Act has been introduced in Congress, while at the same time on the other side of this, there's is it a different law?
Or it's I know at least you say here it's a recommendation by some committee that in fact, what we need to do is be fair and force young women to all register for the draft too.
And that'll be much more progressive and human rightsy than abolishing the thing.
Well, what has happened is that back in the 1980s, the Supreme Court, there was a challenge to requiring men but not women to register.
It went to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court said, well, as long as only men are sent to combat, there's a rational relationship between that and only registering men for a draft.
So fast forward to 2015, when the Obama administration decided to open up all combat assignments in the military to women.
Everybody knew that doing that basically removed the constitutional basis for continuing to register only men.
And so implicit in that was that Congress was going to have to make a choice or the courts would make it for them either to expand registration to women or the courts were going to find that the present system is unconstitutional.
There is a case working its way through the courts, National Coalition for Men versus Selective Service System.
The Supreme Court is now deciding the petition has been filed.
Supreme Court is now deciding whether to hear that case, which could result in a ruling that the present selective service requirement is unconstitutional, which would be great.
But it would also be very embarrassing to Congress to have the courts make that decision.
So there's heavy pressure on Congress to choose.
Congress looked at this in 2016, found they didn't like either option.
They didn't want to end draft registration, but they didn't really want to draft women.
They punted by appointing a national commission to study the question, to report back in four years, that commission reported back recommending, well, we can't think about ending registration.
So definitely sign up the women to send them to war if we have a war.
And now Congress is having to make a decision this year under this pressure of if they don't do something, the courts will and they're not going to like what the courts do.
So a bill has been introduced, the Selective Service Repeal Act, H.R. 2509 and S. 1139, which would not only end registration, but get rid of the draft boards and the whole machinery of the draft.
And it would also eliminate all the penalties for people who haven't registered.
This is really the best shot at ending draft registration that we have had since the program started in 1980.
It's a bipartisan bill.
You've got, you know, liberal Democrats like DeFazio and Wyden, and you've got, you know, libertarian Republicans like Rand Paul on the other side.
It's in the same bill has been introduced, both the House and the Senate.
But at the same time, President Biden has officially come out in favor of expanding draft registration to women.
The same thing that Carter would actually propose back in 1980.
You've got a lot of the Democratic leadership on board with that, and that proposal is likely to come forward as part of the annual National Defense Authorization Act.
So this whole battle over the future of draft registration is likely to be fought out in backroom markup and conference committee negotiations in the backrooms of Congress.
Last year, Jackie Speier, a congressman, liberal feminist congressman from California, the Bay Area, had promised to hold a hearing, but she's backed off.
They don't really want to actually give a public hearing at which the case against the draft would be heard.
They want to say, well, of course, we need to prepare for a draft.
You never know what might happen that might want millions of ground troops.
So now they're kind of backing off.
And so part of the goal of getting this new bill introduced is not just the hope that it will be passed, but at least it gives us a platform to get a hearing in Congress and in the public to get people to understand that this issue was on the table.
But the key thing here is that this is the year for the first time since 1980 that we're going to have a real debate and some kind of a decision, either finally to end draft registration or to make it even worse and perpetuate it and lock it in for the next decades to infect young women as well.
Yeah, isn't that something?
Okay, hang on just one second.
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Well, and you know, I really like the quote that you have of Rand Paul, and I am in the category of people who like to criticize Rand Paul, but hopefully constructively.
And there's sometimes that he's really good and he needs lots of good positive reinforcement when he's good.
And what a great quote here.
He says, if a war is worth fighting, Congress will vote to declare it, and people will volunteer.
There'll be enough Americans ready to defend their country.
I mean, look, after September 11th, he had tens of thousands of people join the army as though we didn't already have a standing army that was prepared to take on a few hundred guys out somewhere.
Ready to go.
And then, but you know what?
That enthusiasm wore off pretty quick, too.
And of course, Congress would have never taken the responsibility to declare it.
The whole thing would have never happened if they'd really had to.
Well, you know, the whole thing about taking the draft off the table, even as a back pocket, a fallback policy option, is it shifts the decision making out of the hands of the Pentagon and Congress to where it should be with the people.
The wars that we will fight will be, as Rand Paul says in that quote, the wars that we would fight would be the people that the wars that the people actually think are worth fighting.
If any, and that's very threatening to those who want to take on for themselves the authority to decide how to risk other people, younger people's lives.
And that I think is, you know, I think a lot of people look at fighting the draft and they say, well, there isn't really any draft.
So why should we care?
They don't see that this isn't about defending draftees.
This is about helping young people realize the victory that they have achieved over government authority to wage unlimited war.
They've taken us with their resistance over the decades, you know, all but the last mile.
We just need to push this over the goal line and get this obsolete, failed law off the books.
And then we can start to work on applying the implications of that to the military planning, which is what they're really afraid of and why they're so eager, even if it means expanding registration to women, which most of them don't really want.
But they feel like if that's what we've got to do to keep the possibility of a draft, we've got to do it.
They care about the draft, even as a possibility, because it's important.
And we should care about it, too, for the same reasons.
Well, Donna Rumsfeld had famously talked about how, oh, we don't need a draft.
You know, we have our professional military to take care of this, that, the other thing.
And of course, you know, nowadays we're not really doing the third infantry division, full scale invasions like Iraq War II.
It's much more drones and special operations forces and and not just Delta Force night raids and stuff, but also Rangers embedding with the local militaries in these different small nation states to take on various guerrilla groups and this kind of thing.
And then even if it comes to fighting Russia and China, I was talking with William Arkin about this.
The idea is we would fight them with ships and planes and missiles and not much infantry and armor.
And so maybe, you know, in a horrible, cynical way, it's an opportunity to say, look, even according to the worst plans for war, you don't need massive numbers of unwilling infantrymen to fight it.
And so, you know, and certainly as we talked about, it wouldn't be a hindrance to them.
And so maybe now, even according to their own goals, right, if even Donald Rumsfeld says we don't need it, then we really don't need it.
Right.
Because he's the biggest hawk of the 20th, 21st century so far.
Well, the argument that was made before the National Commission at the hearings that I attended and that they put forward, I mean, you can go back and they had to come up with totally bizarre scenarios.
You know, the chair of the commission, who's a brigadier general in the Army Reserve, asked me after they'd invited me as a witness, I was the one draft resistor they invited to appear.
You know, he asked me during the hearings, well, suppose we're in a Red Dawn scenario where we're being invaded simultaneously from Canada and Mexico and the president has called for volunteers and not enough people have volunteered.
If we didn't have a draft, what would we do?
This is the length of fantasy that they have to go to to justify a draft.
Yeah.
What if China built 150,000 troop ships and tried to sail them all across the Pacific Ocean at once?
Well, as though the population of Los Angeles couldn't fend them off by themselves with just their local firearms.
But anyway.
Yeah.
And, you know, the reality is, I mean, if there were a real threat, the people would volunteer, as Rand Paul said, as others have said.
And what we have actually is not a history of threats where the country was being invaded and people didn't step up.
What we have is a history of times when the government has claimed that there was an existential threat and there wasn't.
And what we need in those times, and this is what I told the National Commission and Brigadier General Heck, what we need when those claims are made is the kind of check that are people willing to volunteer provides.
We had the claim that Vietnam posed an existential threat to the U.S. in the Tonkin Gulf, which proved to be a lie, but led to a war in which millions died, in which the most honorable thing anybody could say about what did they do in that war was they refused to fight.
We had the claim that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction posed an existential threat to the U.S., which proved to be a lie, but has led to 20 plus years of war.
So you really have to go to bizarre lengths.
And in many ways, the rationales that proponents of the draft put forward make no sense.
They don't really want a draft to defend the U.S. against a simultaneous invasion from Mexico and Canada.
They want a draft because they want an unlimited free hand to wage their own wars for their own purposes around the world with our bodies or the bodies of our sons and daughters and younger brothers and sisters and other young people.
That's the real reason they want a draft.
All right.
Now, Edward, I'm sorry.
I'm really running late here.
I'm actually over time for my next guys.
In fact, they're going to interview me or something.
I forgot who's next.
But anyway, just tell people real quick how they can participate.
I mean, this is really a historic, important moment.
We have two active bills in both houses, H.R. 2509 and Senate 1139, introduced in the Congress.
Bipartisan support, both parties in both houses.
And so what can people do to help get this bill passed?
There's a whole lot of things.
Tell Congress to tell your representatives, your senators to co-sponsor these bills.
Tell them to ask for real, full, fair hearings where they actually hear from opponents of the draft and war and consider these bills.
And don't just ram through something in the back room to expand the draft registration to women and spread the word.
Let people know that this is happening.
Most people have no idea.
Talk particularly to younger people, especially young women, who it may well be that what happens is they do vote to expand draft registration to women.
Young women, it's probably going to start with those who are maybe 15, 16 now in a couple years, may face the same choice that men have been facing for years.
And realize, young people, if you're listening, you have the power to stop this.
You don't have to wait for the government to act.
That's the lesson of the last 40 years.
We said no.
Nobody told us it was your choice.
We were told, you know, go or we'll lock you all up.
And so many of us said no.
But the enforcement broke down within a few years.
Nobody has been prosecuted in decades.
You have more power than you know.
Use your power to stop the war.
Oh, yeah.
All right.
Guys, that's Edward Hasbrook.
He maintains Resisters.info and publishes Resistance News newsletter.
And again, he went to prison for this back in the 80s.
And you can find him constantly writing about this very important issue on the blog at antiwar.com.
And you know the numbers.
Figure it out.
Or the web addresses.
Whoever you got to call.
Local offices.
Write them an email.
HR-2509 and Senate Bill 1139.
And look, Democratic politics is not the key to everything.
But at the same time, these are active bills in both houses right now.
This could really be done if we push to do it.
It's something extremely important to do.
So do your part if you can.
And thank you very much, Edward.
Really appreciate it.
My pleasure, Scott.
Keep up your good work.
