In the piece Silber makes a great point about the fallacy that a military draft would end the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which has been made by numerous anti-war commentators over the last eight years, and most recently by Matthew How, a top military official who resigned from his position in Afghanistan last month.
The same factors that ultimately led those who determine U.S. foreign policy to abandon Vietnam ensure that the U.S. will not leave the CENTCOM area of operations for decades, if ever.
On the same point, I also note this statement from Barbara Tuchman, which is the sentence immediately following the paragraph set forth above: "The purpose of the war [in Vietnam] was not gain or national defense." By the early 1970s, both parts of that truth began to penetrate minds that had earlier been resistant to them. During this same period, another event occurred, one of immense importance historically and to the U.S. ruling class in particular.
Remember the year of Nixon's historic trip to China: 1972. As their previous justifications for the Vietnam catastrophe began to fall away, the ruling class realized that another route was advisable not only for strategic reasons concerning national defense, but because it would be hugely profitable for the ruling class, including many multinational corporations: engagement. We must recognize these truths about the ruling class: it is undeniably insatiable in its thirst for power and wealth and in its willingness to commit any acts to satisfy that desire, including the murder of vast numbers of innocent human beings, and it is ruthlessly determined -- and it also is not stupid. Nixon himself, as deeply damaged an individual as he was and as thoroughly detestable in countless ways, was similarly not remotely dumb by any measure, certainly not when it came to calculations of this kind. Peaceful engagement with China held the promise of many benefits, not least among them immense wealth for the ruling class, an obvious truth that events have borne out.
In the early 1970s, all of these factors came together in a way that recommended a different course of action altogether, and that was the course the U.S. finally followed. We can thus see that neither the beginning of U.S. involvement in Vietnam following World War II, nor the increasing intensity of that involvement throughout the next two decades, nor the decision to finally abandon Vietnam in the 1970s, connected in any major way to opposition to the draft or to this particular war in the manner suggested by Hoh. The initiation of U.S. involvement and its growth occurred with the draft in place throughout that period, and the U.S. left Vietnam for very different reasons. If anything, the draft made possible the U.S. presence in Vietnam for 30 years. So the truth on this question is precisely the opposite of what Hoh suggests, at least insofar as this very significant historical example would indicate.
As to Hoh's contention that "a draft would engage our population in the debate," I can only say that I view this as approaching the delusional. If anything, a draft makes any government's decision and ability to engage in destructive "wars of choice" more likely, not less (and Vietnam is but one example of that principle). Moreover, the American public's astonishing, even sickening, ability to remain apathetic and immovable even when heinous crimes are committed by their government has almost certainly increased immeasurably in recent decades. If the endless crimes committed by the Bush administration demonstrated nothing else, they surely demonstrated that. As the Bush administration launched two wars, were there massive, ongoing demonstrations, protests or, most importantly, systematic acts of civil disobedience? There were a few large protests before the Iraq invasion (which were almost entirely ignored), but otherwise, there was nothing. As the Bush administration tortured, brutalized and regularly set aside the most basic protections of individual liberty, and did all this in broad daylight, did outraged citizens bring government to a standstill, demanding that these depredations cease? They did not.
