07/20/12 – Matthew Harwood – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, I'm Scott Horton, this is Anti-War Radio here on Pacifica, 90.7 FM in LA, and it's been a very productive week on my other radio show as well.
Today I talked with Jeremiah Gulka, all about the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, communist terrorist cult, as well as Pepe Escobar, all about the civil war for regime change going on in Syria, Jeff Patterson about the persecution of Bradley Manning, yesterday I spoke with Nathan Wessler from the ACLU about their new lawsuit against Obama for the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son in Yemen, and earlier in the week, Patrick Coburn on the terrible humanitarian crisis post-war in Libya, and David Vine about America's worldwide empire of bases.
You can find the archives of all those interviews at scotthortonshow.com.
And now to our next guest, it's Matthew Harwood, he's a writer in Washington D.C. who's written for the Washington Monthly, the Huffington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, and most often times, where I've seen him anyway, is writing in the Guardian, guardian.co.uk.
The latest is, why bringing back the draft for military service would be a disaster, aside from conscription violating citizens' freedom from state servitude, what havoc might have bloated U.S. military wreck?
Welcome to the show, Matt, how are you doing?
Doing well, Scott.
Great to be back.
So, yeah, it's good to talk to you, and it's great to see this article.
I hear this conventional wisdom all the time, sort of like people say, World War II saved us from the Great Depression, or people say the draft ended the Vietnam War, and if only we had a draft now, you hear anti-war people say this, Charles Rangel is famous among the Democrats in Congress for saying, all we need is a draft, and then rich white moms will object that their boys' lives are put in danger, and then finally we'll see the war machine grind to a halt, just like it happened back in the 1960s.
You disagree with that?
70s, I guess.
I do disagree with that.
Well, I do disagree with that.
I think it's an incredible gamble with people's lives to say that bringing back the draft will lead the United States to be less aggressive or more risk-averse when it comes to war.
I mean, you've got to have a lot of evidence to prove that, and I don't think there's really any evidence throughout American history to prove that.
Yeah, well, you know, even during the Vietnam times, they had changed the rules, right?
For now, being married, being in college, these kinds of things would no longer exempt you, and that really did cause an increase in the protest movement and all that.
But then the war went on for seven more years after that or something, so it was hardly an open-and-shut solution, and there were a lot of other correlations to that causation too, I bet, if you asked the Vietnamese, for example.
Yeah, you would hope so.
I mean, and again, we should be clear to say that this is really coming out of something that General Stanley McChrystal, or the former General, or retired General Stanley McChrystal, said at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which was taken up by Thomas Ricks, who's the fellow at the Center for New American Security.
He blogs at FarmPolicy.com under The Last Defense.
So they're bringing up this idea, and for me, it was just really important to get out there and say, this is a really incredibly horrible idea, and it always seems interesting that it's always elderly white, or maybe not elderly, but older white men who seem to cleave onto this idea.
Well, now, it's funny, isn't it, that Thomas Ricks, who's basically the former Washington Post reporter and really just surrogate for David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal and that entire Center for New American Security crowd and the bogus coin doctrine, which really did work as a PR stunt for prolonging the war in Afghanistan, but has completely and utterly failed to, quote-unquote, pacify that country and make Karzai the leader of a real government over there, if that was indeed their objective.
Now they just need something new to push.
Nobody's buying their counterinsurgency failure anymore, so now they need something else.
But I'm curious, it seems like, from the way that you quote Stanley McChrystal and Tom Ricks here, it's almost as though they're trying to sell this, really, as that anti-war option rather than just, you know, these are think tankers who want an unlimited supply of cannon fodder to use.
There's an entire Africa out there to conquer, don't you know?
Well, you know, what's interesting, I think, about Rick's proposal, if you look at it in the New York Times, is that what he's saying is, if there is a conscription, there'd be like two tracks.
So the first track is, you go into the military for 18 months and in return you get free college.
But what's interesting about it is, it's basically for cheap labor.
These are not people who'd be...the conscripts, under Rick's proposal, would never see combat.
They would never deploy.
They're basically just to do menial tasks for the Pentagon.
And then the second track would be, civilians would go into, say, a national service type thing, I guess, like AmeriCorps, things like that.
And then that would be for 24 months.
So what's interesting about it is, it doesn't compute this idea that bringing back this type of draft would lead to less war.
Because if you're being conscripted under this system, you're never going to see combat anyway.
So it's just, you know, it's like 1 plus 1 equals 3 here with this proposal.
This doesn't make sense.
Well, yeah, I mean, if anything, it means freeing up more privates and specialists for menial tasks, which most of which are probably carried out by contractors nowadays anyway, right?
It's not like Clinger peeling potatoes on MASH here.
Well, yeah, but I think what's really interesting about it is, and it's kind of the core of what Rick's is saying in the New York Times op-ed piece, is that it's really almost like American society looking for cheap labor, in the sense that when you hit 18 for, you know, anywhere from 18 months to 24 months, you no longer own yourself.
I mean, that's a really interesting type of proposal when you look at it that way.
He's pretty clear about what he's talking about here.
I mean, he actually writes cheap labor in there.
So, you know, when you start thinking about this, when does conscripts start looking a little bit like slaves?
Yeah, and really, what does the Empire care what a soldier costs?
I mean, they get all their money for free anyway.
It's not like they have to sell something that somebody wants in order to make enough money to have all the wars they wage all the time, you know?
Well, yeah.
And also, I guess it's like supply and demand here.
So if Rick's is basically saying we can give a greater supply to the Pentagon, that's going to lead American society to push back and say, hey, use this human capital that you have now judiciously.
It doesn't really make sense.
Yeah, you're right.
And of course, even if they did assign all the conscripts to menial tasks at first, the first time they needed them, they just put them right through the rest of boot camp or whatever and ship them off to the front line.
In fact, they'd probably be the first ones on the front line if it's real risky behavior out there, you know, fighting in a Sunni triangle or a highway of IEDs in Afghanistan or something.
Yeah, and what's interesting, too, is why would the American people trust the American government to use this power now?
Again, conservatively, considering what happened with Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, it just doesn't make sense.
Why take this gamble?
It just does not make sense to me.
Yeah, well, and especially when it's proposed by Stanley McChrystal, who lost the war in Afghanistan, or at least was one of the big losers of the war in Afghanistan.
Not that he or any other general could have won, but that's his fault for taking the job.
Well, yeah, that's what I was going to say.
It seems to be an unwinnable war, which I would think almost every counterinsurgency war is.
Basically unwinnable.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Matthew Harwood, writing about the draft and the Guardian.
I guess the good thing is this isn't really that popular of a theory.
It gets floated from time to time, but for the most part, I think the military's stayed real close to what Rumsfeld said about all this, which was that he didn't want a bunch of conscripts.
They wouldn't be good soldiers.
He wants people who, at the very least, can rationalize to themselves that, hey, this is my job.
I signed up for it.
I have to do it, kind of thing.
And that anything less than that is just going to be poor performing.
Maybe cheap labor, but not worth it.
Yeah, and I think that's an interesting point.
I mean, if you want to get even just being technocratic or practical about this.
So you have all these kids coming into military service, and they don't want to be there.
So what happens when you resist?
When you say, I'm not going to do that job, or I don't want to do this?
Do these kids go to prison?
Yeah, the brig.
Because of their defying orders?
I mean, it just, again, it just seems to be, doesn't seem like a very well thought out proposal here.
Yeah.
Well, and good.
I hope it's really taken that way.
You make a real good case in your article, again, it's Matthew Harwood writing in the Guardian, why bringing back the draft for military service would be a disaster.
But you do hear this kind of thing from time to time about how people ought to be made to volunteer.
And we should have some kind of national service.
And you know, people, they just out there, you know, in the world who are non-government employees, they're just too concerned with living their own lives.
And we need to stop that.
And we need to find things to make them do.
And, of course, as long as the society at large holds military service up as the highest profession, better than a doctor or whatever, then, you know, that's going to be the direction they go.
A lot of people.
Well, yeah, and if you had the confidence, if you had the confidence in this proposal, you would actually invert it and you would tie benefits to volunteering to do this type of service.
Not the other way around.
Not coercing people into it.
And then, on the back end, giving them benefits for doing something that they didn't volunteer to, that they were coerced into it.
I guess, can you throw it back at the Tom Ricks of the world?
Tom Ricks, I believe, is about 56 years old.
Wouldn't their labor be more valuable to the Pentagon right now, after all their years of experience?
Well, at least, you know, I haven't read too much of Rick's writing, but he was skeptical of the Iraq War, at least.
Well, actually, he was the greatest champion of the bogus surge publicity stunt, where they basically accepted the deal the Sunnis had been offering all along, to just pay them to stop fighting.
And then he went to war against Muqtada al-Sadr and, you know, Petraeus wasted a bunch of lives fighting the guy who's still, to this day, the most powerful force in the Iraqi government.
And so, you know, I would think that he took whatever credibility he earned with Fiasco, which was the first book, with the second, which was called, I think, The Gamble or something about how it all worked out.
Yeah, The Gamble.
It was on Petraeus.
Unfortunately, I never read it, so I wouldn't want to get into criticizing it at all.
Yeah.
Well, anyway, he was the biggest cheerleader in the media for the surge doctrine, and then even left the Washington Post to go be a propagandist directly for CNAS on the Afghan surge and all the pressure on Obama to add the 30,000 troops back in 2009.
Well, that's good.
You know, it's interesting, because I've never seen it laid out like that, and it's interesting that you bring it out like that, so people actually can see the connections with the journalists and think tanks and all these things, in the sense that it's not necessarily an objective person making these recommendations.
Yeah.
It's also true that when you examine the situation in any of these wars beyond a slogan like the surge worked, you find out that it's never true, you know?
Any more than the draft is a good idea is true, either.
No, I couldn't agree with you more.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you very much for your time, Matthew, and it's great to see you writing again.
Great.
Thank you so much, Scott.
I always appreciate it coming on.
All right, everybody.
That's Matthew Harwood.
This one's in The Guardian, guardian.co.uk.
Why bringing back the draft for military service would be a disaster.
And that's it for Anti-War Radio tonight.
Thanks very much for listening.
We're here every Friday from 630 to 7 Pacific on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
Full interview archives are at scotthortonshow.com.