08/14/07 – Scott Kohlhass – The Scott Horton Show

All right, everybody, I'm Scott.
Welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
My guest today is Scott Kohlhaas.
He's the chairman of the Libertarian Party of Alaska.
He runs draftresistance.org, and he owns himself.
Isn't that right, Scott Kohlhaas?
Well, yes, I do.
Of course, life ownership is the main reason we oppose the draft.
We own our lives.
We own our bodies.
And the government doesn't have the right to tell us what to do.
So if I say to you, back to the front, you will die when I say you must die, then you're telling me no?
Well, it depends.
I mean, we're not pacifists.
You know, we're libertarians.
We'll pick up a gun.
We just won't guarantee which way we'll point it.
So if I have agreed to follow you, you know, if I think you're fighting for freedom, I'm there for you.
But no, I'm not going to accept orders from our authoritarian government.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
I just, I started the show so pissed off today because the top headline, I don't know if you saw this, Greg Mitchell, an editor and publisher, talking about at least 118 American soldiers in Iraq have blown their own brains out.
Yeah, 3%, they said.
Yeah, never mind going around having to play the IED lottery in an aluminum Humvee all goddamn day.
You know, a lot of these guys, they're coming home and they're saying, forget this, I'm not going back out tomorrow.
And they'll kill themselves rather than go back out tomorrow.
Yeah, I had a chance to talk to Evan Knappenberger, who is former military.
He's at towerguard.org and he is going around the country doing vigils against stop loss.
He's on the National Mall in Washington right now and he has all kinds of stories to tell about what people are doing to get out of the military, you know, pregnancy, you know, just, you know, claiming your homosexual, anything they can do to get out.
It starts with, you know, suicide and goes all the way down the line.
So it's an unjust war and so you have to expect that people are going to do what they, you know, what they have to do to get out of it.
Well, back that up, how do you say it's an unjust war?
It's a war being waged by America, what could be more just than that?
Oh, we took a total wrong turn when they decided to attack a country that didn't attack us.
That had never happened before.
So, this Bush regime has taken us down a very dangerous road.
Vietnam was an unjust war.
It was a war that, it was a fight that we picked, you know, we picked that fight and we deserve to lose and we deserve to lose again because we're on the wrong side in Iraq.
Now, you talked about, you mentioned stop loss there.
Your friend who's on the Mall in D.C. right now, for people who aren't familiar, what's stop loss, Scott?
Stop loss is, in effect, a draft.
What they've done is they've taken the military people who were in the individual ready reserve, you know, you sign up, you sign up for eight years.
You get four years active and then four years in this reserve.
But what they've done is people who were ready to get out of the reserve, they've done their eight years and everybody, you know, after them has been, you know, forced to stay in the military.
And some people, one Evan Knappenberger was telling me about this one gal who's ETS, End Time of Service, is 2,038.
That's what she gets on her paycheck every, you know, whatever they tell her, her End Time of Service.
And so they're drafting some of these folks for the next few decades.
And now, is this a violation of their contract or this is within the contract?
They get them a week before their eight years is up or what?
Yeah, I didn't understand this at first.
I thought, well, they signed a contract, so, you know, woe to them.
But no, this is not part of the contract.
They can't, this is a special sort of draft.
And my fear is, they'll use it as a wedge to get full-blown conscription.
They'll say, look, we've been drafting these guys, now it's not fair, they're exposing themselves.
And so everybody should have to expose themselves.
So we're going to draft everyone.
Or they'll start with computer specialists or linguists or health care professionals.
Right, exactly.
Eventually, of course, using this to get what they want, which is full-blown conscription of the 18-year-old.
And we've heard trial balloons like that over the years, haven't we?
Starting with the specialists, right?
You're a computer tech, you're a mechanic, you know how to work on tanks.
As you say, health care professionals.
We need medics over here.
And start drafting the specialists first, but then that's not fair.
Well, that's why it's so funny to hear selective service, you're correct.
And selective slavery says, there are no plans for a draft.
Excuse me?
That's the biggest lie of all, because of course they have plans for a draft.
They have plans to draft all these groups you just mentioned, and they plan on a draft every day.
So why are we supposed to believe anything they say that their credibility is shot?
And yeah, any sort of draft is unacceptable.
Now, I'm sure you saw this news just the other day, well, I guess it was last Friday.
The new war czar, this position apparently was created by Bush and Hadley because they didn't want to do their job anymore.
So they created this new job for a general in the White House, I believe, to coordinate the state and defense departments, whatever.
They're calling him the war czar, you know, like the Russians.
His name is Douglas Lute, and he went on state radio Friday and floated the idea of a draft and said, you know, this is something we might have to look at here.
Right, and we posted on our website, www.draftresistance.org, that now the Pentagon is scoring.
They're rambling after this general came out and basically told the truth.
He said that they were considering the draft.
It is on the table.
And so they scrambled, the Pentagon scrambled to say, no, you know, we're not considering it.
Just the same sort of lies and doublespeak that we get from selective slavery when they say there are no plans for a draft.
Well, you know, they are considering it.
They've considered every, you know, military possibility in your mind that you could possibly think of.
They have invasion plans for Burundi.
Well, now let me stop you there, Scott, because I think I think maybe someone trying to dismiss your argument would say, yeah, but they have invasion plans for Burundi.
But that doesn't mean that they actually intend to invade Burundi.
Fine.
But don't tell me you don't have plans to invade Burundi, because you do.
You know, all I want is some simple honesty.
And of course, truth is the first casualty of war.
These guys have been lying since the beginning.
And so you're right, I mean, doesn't mean they plan to do a draft, but they are considering it.
So just stop lying to me.
Yeah.
And, you know, the people in Burundi ought to look out.
I don't mean to say they're, you know, somehow safe, because they're clearly not wherever the hell that place is.
Now, let's always share with the audience here some quotes.
This is reading from Time magazine quoting Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, the new war czar.
America has a war czar, and this is what he told state radio last Friday, I think it makes sense to certainly consider it.
And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table.
But ultimately, this is a policy matter between meeting and demands for the nation's security by one means or another, he said in his first interview.
There's both a personal dimension of this, where this kind of stress plays out across dinner tables and in living room conversations within these families, he said, and ultimately the health of the all volunteer force is going to rest on those sorts of personal family decisions.
It sounds to me like what he's saying is, Scott, you better give up your son's in military or else they're going to take him from you.
You know, these guys are like robots.
And it's interesting, of course, they recognize what some of the factors are, but in the end, they have no principles.
And thus, they'll use it if they're programmed to use it or if they're ordered to use it.
It's either that or arrogance, that they think that they can just broaden the show any way they want.
The 13th amendment, what are you talking about?
Natural rights?
No, no, no.
You know, we went into JD Hayworth's office one time, he's a supposedly libertarian leaning congressman and he said that, you know, we're trying to get rid of selective slavery and get it abolished.
And he said, you know, we don't really need selective service because we can get this information anytime we want from driver's licenses and, you know, all kinds of other public records.
Good point.
Yes, and yet, you know, no, we said, of course, you know, our position is that even if the country were on one knee, coughing up blood, and our enemies were about to swing the final blow, we could never ever resort to conscription because then we lost before they finished us off.
We'd lose what we were fighting for.
And of course, you could have heard a pin drop in that room because they couldn't believe.
But that was the honest bottom line of the resistance, no compromise, militant resistance.
I'm with you.
And you know what?
If we were on one knee choking up blood being invaded by foreign armies and we weren't willing to grab rifles and kill them until they were gone, then we don't deserve to be free anyway.
Right.
If there's a foreign army rolling into Travis County, and believe me, Travis County is probably the least armed of all the counties in Texas, they could be rolling tanks into this county, some foreign army, they will all get shot to death until they leave in humiliation, just like our guys in Mosul.
And even if, Scott, let me remind you that even if there's, of course, we've got many pacifists, people who are true pacifists in this society, in this free society, and a lot of them have come here running from conscription.
But even if they decide they cannot pick up a gun, then we as free men will fight twice as hard.
We'll find a way, we're clever, we'll find a way to win because we're free men.
So it doesn't mean everybody's going to pick up a gun, but we'll have enough to hit critical mass.
I think you probably know what percentage of the American population actually supported the American Revolution.
It was a very small number, 2020.
I think it was 3%.
We don't need everybody.
We only need enough to make it happen.
So yeah, we can defend this country.
What they need the draft for, of course, is to go into countries where we don't need to go.
Right.
And of course, there's no power or group of powers on Earth that would even contemplate invading North America.
I mean, give me a break.
Well, after what we've done, and we've gone around flirting with disaster everywhere, sticking our nose in every 800-year-old squabble out there.
And so eventually, and we've built an empire, and we're going to pay, and we are paying for it in our civil liberties.
But eventually, who could blame someone for trying because we have just pushed and pushed and pushed?
Yeah, well, I mean, I agree that, well, in fact, I often try to explain how we're pushing Russia and China together, healing the old Sino-Soviet split, pushing Berlin and Paris into that same axis as well.
But still, I mean, how many ships would it take to try to get an invasion army to the East Coast of the United States?
You know what I mean?
It would be, yeah, in 250 years or something, get back to me.
And we could be bombed, I guess.
I could see the Russians and the Chinese, you know, ganging up and bombing us or something.
But actually putting ground forces in this country where we have two mountain ranges and 500 million privately owned firearms for 300 million people, give me a break.
Yeah, but think about it, because you have to think outside the box on this one.
That's what our so-called enemies are doing.
They're going around, they spend a dollar somewhere, and we come in and spend a million.
We chase after them and spend a million.
And this is how it could happen, and then you've got maybe the Republic of Texas splits off, and maybe Alaska splits off, and all of a sudden it's a different story.
So you just never know.
You have to, you know, America and Bush have been so thick, and they went into Iraq, and that was exactly what they, you know, what the other side or whatever.
And this is how our enemies are fighting us, is they're spending a dollar and getting us to spend a billion.
What now?
I'm saying this is exactly how our enemies are fighting us now.
They spend a dollar to get us to spend a billion.
That is their strategy, is to overextend our empire to the point of collapse.
And it's working.
And it is working.
And, you know, I wouldn't be really too sad about it, the empire collapse.
The problem is we're going to have some serious problems here at home as well.
Well, hopefully we will.
I mean, after Vietnam, we didn't change our two-party system.
You know, we just went right on with what we had and with an interventionist foreign policy, and now we've stumbled into another Iraq.
Or another Vietnam in Iraq.
So, you know, what we have to do now is get serious about building another political party that has a foreign policy of neutrality, and then maybe we can save what's left.
Yeah, well, that sounds like a good idea to me.
And it's funny the way you say neutrality.
Don't you mean isolation?
No.
Free trade is not isolation, it's the exact opposite of that.
What we're talking about is a political neutrality where we don't get involved and back Israel over Palestine or, you know, whatever.
We're a nation of businessmen.
We're trading freely, you know, but we're not getting involved in their politics.
All right, now, let's get back here to the troops and the draft and that kind of stuff here.
And, by the way, just tuning in, I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Scott Kohlhaas from draftresistance.org.
And you have your seven reasons there at the top of the page why people should not register for a Selective Service or why they should tell their 17-year-old about to turn 18 not to fill out that paperwork and send it in.
That's right.
We think non-registration is the strategy to beat the draft.
If enough people say no, it doesn't have to be everybody like we talked about before, it only has to be enough, then the system will break down.
Because if Johnny doesn't sign up, then Billy down the street's not going to go because it's not fair.
You know, they learned some things from the Vietnam draft and one of the things they learned was they have to try to make it fair this time and that means taking everybody.
And if everybody doesn't go, then it's going to break down and that's what we're hoping for if they try to live out this madness.
So, yeah, we're telling people to just don't lift a finger to help Selective Service, just kick back and watch it crumble.
What if I already registered?
Well, there are several things you can do.
You know, it's far be it from me to explain what the rules are, but you're supposed to upgrade your address every time you move between 18 and 26 and of course millions haven't registered in the first place, but then tens of millions more haven't kept up with it.
And so if you haven't registered, you can move.
Our problem is they're choking us off in the DMV in 35 states.
If you get a driver's license in more than half the states, they're going to automatically re-register you.
They're going to automatically register you if you haven't.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
How long has that been the law that your states, 35 of the states, are registering driver's license information and handing it over to the Selective Service?
Selective Service is not sitting around doing nothing.
They've been working.
First of all, they passed the Solomon Amendment federally, you know, that cut off financial aid to college unless you register.
Well, they automatically register you through that.
And then they work through the states to make the Solomon Amendment deep, go deep.
And now they've been working on the same thing.
Up here in Alaska, they tied it to the Permanent Fund, which is a check that 93% of the people in Alaska get.
So we don't have it linked to the driver's license up here because that would be meaningless in most of these small towns out there because they don't drive, but the Permanent Fund was a different story.
Yeah, they're tying it to these things.
And you could say on the one hand that they're not enforcing the Selective Service, the Military Selective Service Act.
They are not prosecuting people.
They haven't prosecuted anybody in 20 years plus.
And so there are millions of people who haven't done it.
What are they going to do?
Build concentration camps.
On the other hand, they are enforcing the Military Selective Service Act on a massive scale behind the scenes with the computers and walking a very fine line.
They're threatening the young people with five years in prison and a quarter million dollars.
What 18-year-old has a quarter million dollars, they might as well make it $25 million.
But on the other hand, on the other side of the line, they're saying this is no big deal.
A lot of people don't even know they're registering people.
They'd be surprised.
A lot of people from the 60s generation.
So they walk that fine line, but they are prepared.
They are prepared to do it.
Well, I hate to pitch the utilitarian argument to you, but this is a common sentiment not only among Democrats in the Congress, but even among Democrats I know who tell me, hey, you don't know, kid, but the only reason that the Vietnam War ended is because they changed the rules on the draft.
It was no longer just the ghettos being emptied out and sent to Vietnam to die, but it was all of a sudden the college kids too.
And that's the only thing that ended the Vietnam War, was eight years of people protesting in the streets.
And the only reason that they did was because of the draft.
This is something that we lament all the time over at AntiWar.com and on my blog, Stress, people talk about in the comments.
There is no real anti-war movement, and it can all be traced back to one fact.
There's no conscription.
So what are these Democrats suggesting, that we go back to the draft and somehow end the war?
They'll go over this incredible manpower tool to the Bush administration and let them use that to prolong the violence.
These Democrats are so perverted, it's insane to think that somehow if we draft the sons and daughters of the Senators, then they'll go over there and they'll see all the badness and they'll come back and they'll tell their fathers and mothers about it and then an end will come to this war.
So if these leaders are so isolated from what's happening and the people, then we need term limitations like we have for the President, thank goodness, and get them out of there.
We don't need to draft a generation to end this war.
We need to let the military manpower dry up, and it's drying up.
All signs point to it.
They're letting everybody in with tattoos, criminals, people who don't graduate from high school, they're loosening all their restrictions, but eventually they're going to face conscription.
And they'll probably use it before they give up on the war.
And that's when it can all end, because that's sort of their Achilles heel.
We can't stop their war, it appears, it's been going on for six years, but when they come back to the draft, then we have a chance to see it break down.
Yeah, and you mentioned they're lowering their standards all across the board.
People with criminal convictions, dropouts, which I don't really have a problem with dropouts, I would have been one myself, but it used to be that you had to be an Eagle Scout, man.
That's right, that's all I'm saying.
I'm not casting any moral judgments on people because I think volunteers are better than draftees and I don't care if you're 42 and if you can hump the boonies or whatever, but my suggestion, of course, is that you don't join at this time, that it's not the kind of business you want to be in, really.
You know, Ron Paul pointed out in the most recent debate in Iowa that the Congress had tried, and I guess they had tried and failed once, and then maybe they got it passed the second time, if I got my facts straight, to pass a law mandating that soldiers who have done a tour in Iraq get at least as long of a break here before they go back as they spent over there.
And the Republicans apparently successfully killed this the first time, but then they got it passed finally the second time.
Yeah, we'll see if it holds.
You know, it's going to make things very interesting, I mean, this is in response to the Pentagon just extending their tours, you know, and really, as long as they have the power or the right or whatever, if they think they can do it, it's inevitable that these guys will be over there for a long, long time.
See, that's another thing that points to a serious manpower shortage, so hang on to your seats there.
Yeah.
Colin Powell actually, what, six months ago or more, said that the army is almost broken.
We cannot continue like this, and in fact, a caller to the show yesterday suggested that perhaps this was a trial balloon, not to see whether we'd put up with the draft, but perhaps this was a trial balloon for ending the war, that this is a way to say, look, we're either going to have to start conscripting people or we're going to have to give this up because we don't have the manpower to do it.
That is an interesting perspective.
A hopeful one, I guess.
In a way, again, yes, it could signal an end to the war, because if they had to go to the draft and they couldn't do it, then that would be the end.
But on the other hand, there has been a lot of whining, you know, we're in the middle of a world war, basically, that Bush declared, because he said you're either with us or you're against us, and so we've suffered over 4,000 dead between Afghanistan and Iraq.
But when you think about what we could sustain, they call this a long war, and it's going to go on until we end it.
But I don't think we're anywhere near broken.
I hear this whining out there, and I'm just amazed, because we've seen other countries, Germany lost 3 million in four years on the Russian front alone.
That's like 3,000 people every day.
I appreciate the fact that people in this country have no stomach for war.
We have an anti-militarist tradition in this country, and thank goodness for that.
The first sight of blood, and we're like crying foul, and we want to get out of there, you know, our nose has been bloodied.
And thank goodness, because there are fascist elements in this country that would have us at war for the rest of our lives, and so I'm glad that there's this whining.
But I still sort of look at the military and go, no, these guys could go into North Korea, they could go into Iran, they could do all kinds of damage.
We'll wake up one morning and just find out they attacked another country.
That's how it works these days.
I remember Grenada was like that.
We just woke up one day and we were in Grenada, nobody prepared us psychologically or anything with any propaganda.
It was just boom, done.
Right, same for Panama, too, in the middle of the night.
It was the next morning on the news.
By the way, we killed the few thousand people in Panama yesterday.
Thousands.
And the thing is, they're preparing us psychologically for this Iran attack, you know, every day.
So you've got to figure, well, that's a real possibility.
Hey, you mentioned Americans carrying an inordinate amount compared to, you know, during the Second World War or whatever, the Axis nations and so forth, about casualties.
If only for trivia's sake or because it's just kind of fun, I want to play for you this clip of Dick Cheney, where he almost sounds like an individualist there at the end.
This clip, I don't know if you've seen it, it's from 1994.
It's available on the antiwar.com blog.
It's Dick Cheney at the American Enterprise Institute in 1994, defending his and Scowcroft's and Powell's and Bush's, Bush One's decision to not overthrow Saddam Hussein.
And then especially check out the last part.
He almost sounds like a libertarian.
This is from grandtheftcountry.com.
Do you think that U.S. or U.N. forces should have moved into Baghdad?
No.
Why not?
Because if we'd gone to Baghdad, we would have been all alone, there wouldn't have been anybody else with us.
There would have been a U.S. occupation of Iraq, none of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.
Once you got to Iraq and took it over and took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place?
That's a very volatile part of the world and if you take down the central government in Iraq, you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off, part of it the Syrians would like to have to the west, part of eastern Iraq, the Iranians would like to claim fought over for eight years.
In the north, you've got the Kurds and if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten the territorial integrity of Turkey.
It's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take away Iraq.
The other thing was casualties.
Everyone was impressed with the fact that we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had but for the 146 Americans killed in action and for their families, it wasn't a cheap war.
And the question for the president in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth and our judgment was not very many and I think we got it right.
Wow.
Would you get a load of that?
That's beautiful.
He's right on all counts.
You know, these guys, they campaigned on sort of a pullback, our foreign commitment platform and then just got their Reichstag fire and totally turned it around, makes you think they really plan to go in it, you know, really, in my humble opinion, I think they've planned to go in since 1979 when Iran took the hostages, they set up the rapid deployment force.
They wanted to go in then but they couldn't.
It's taken 25 years and more to build up the ability to go in and they're in and setting it up and Iran, I would be nervous, you know, we're surrounding them in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yeah, even though, I mean, he's right on all counts there and they know their opposition and he just basically, you know, did a total 360.
Well, now, where he says that 194 is a lot if you're one of the dead or you're one of the family members who, you know, lost his loved one over there, is Mao Zedong right that America is a paper tiger?
Here we have this world empire but we're not willing to take the casualties necessary to maintain it?
Yeah, I think that's pretty obvious.
I think that's pretty obvious.
I mean, when we got to Europe...
No, is that a bad thing?
What, no?
Is that a bad thing, I guess, is the next question.
No, it's not a bad thing.
I mean, you know, I would rather wear tennis shoes than jack boots, you know, I mean, I'm an American, you know, we're having a party over here and it's wonderful and we don't want to ruin it but, you know, you look at Europe in World War II, by the time we got there, we were facing the Hitler Youth and the Volkssturm, you know, the cream of the Germans was wiped out in Russia and really Russia beat Germany but we're all like...
And we got in late in World War I and we're all about that but I think the only war we've ever fought that was justified was the American Revolution.
All this other stuff is crap.
Tell me about what's going on up in Alaska.
Are you still the chairman of the libertarian party?
Well, I meant to tell you that, no, you know, things change and...
It has been a couple years since we've talked, I think.
Yeah, it has and it's been a while and we've got a new chairman up here, he's a young guy and he's working at it so, you know, we're backing him and I'm actually working for the National Party, Libertarian Party now, trying to raise money for ballot access, trying to break down the ballot access law.
All right, well, good for you everybody.
Scott Kohlhaus, draftresistance.org.
They want your kids and it's up to you to stop them and Scott Kohlhaus can help so check out draftresistance.org.
Thanks a lot for your time.
Appreciate it, man.
Thank you, Scott.
Okay.