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It is unlikely, however, that the U.S. will bring back the draft. The armed forces now number 2 million, with l.5 million reservists. Congress has ordered the military to cut its ranks by 80,000 by next year. A draft would become necessary only if the U.S. planned to maintain an enormous deployment of troops abroad for a number of years, or if it suffered extremely high casualties. Both of those conditions are unlikely for political reasons. The entire thrust of the Bush strategy, after all, is to get a war over quickly, if one comes. "Assuming we don't," says former Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb, "the American people won't let you take enough casualties to need a draft."
Some, like former Navy Secretary James Webb, believe the draft should be revived so that any American war effort would be broadly, democratically based, the fighting and dying shared by all classes. It is true that some 30% of Army enlisted men are black, although blacks make up 12.4% of the population. But the armed forces are no longer drawn as heavily from the ranks of the poor, as they were, for example, in the volunteer force of the late 1970s. Most U.S. soldiers now come from the middle working class, with both affluent and very poor urban populations underrepresented.
Whether a draft would result in a fairer military service is debatable. A renewal of conscription, however, would no doubt restore to full vigor an antiwar movement that is already beginning to stir. "One way to really get the fire going," says Martin Binkin, a military manpower specialist at the Brookings Institution, "is to start talking about a draft. I think what you'd see is that normally quiet campuses, like Berkeley, M.I.T. and Harvard, would explode with demonstrations: 'Hell, no, we won't go! We won't fight for Texaco.' "
Organizers of a teach-in at the University of Michigan were surprised when more than 1,500 people turned out to hear a discussion of the Persian Gulf. "I figured we'd get 300," says an organizer.
Most Americans are morally clear about Saddam Hussein and the nature of his crime against Kuwait. He may not be another Hitler, as Bush overstated the case, trying to turn Saddam Hussein into a sort of world-historical Willie Horton. But he is villain enough to need to be stopped. Virtually no American dissenters from the Bush policies idealize Saddam Hussein in the way, say, that American radicals in the '60s praised the Viet Cong ("Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh/ Viet Cong is gonna win!"). The argument is whether to go in and fight now or to wait, isolate Iraq and gamble that international sanctions will produce a solution.
But Americans do not enjoy much moral clarity about their mission in the gulf or its motives. Says Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: "There has been a major mobilization without an underlying rationale at a time when people are concerned about education, about the environment, the homeless, and how they are going to pay the bills this month."