The Disingenuousness of Charlie Rangel

Another contribution from Anotmo. This one called, Disingenuous Disingenuousness. Thanks, Anotmo.

Disingenuous Disingenuousness

Rep. Charles Rangel says he wants to re-institute the draft because, without it, well-to-do and well-educated young people with good prospects in the private sector will avoid military service by not volunteering while the poor and uneducated with lower financial prospects will be forced to volunteer for the military as the only way available to them to improve their lot in life. The affluent political class whose sons and daughters are safely ensconced in Yale, Harvard or lucrative employment will, therefore, be more inclined to get us into wars that the poor will then have to fight.

Opponents counter with statistics showing that the average income potential and education level of our voluntary military are higher than that of the country at large and that the number of such volunteers has proved quite adequate to meet our military requirements.

All of which, misses the point entirely. Rep Rangel knows full well the truth of his opponents’ position. That is precisely the problem from his perspective. Rep Rangel wants the draft re-instituted not for the reasons he states but for the reasons his opponents’ state. With our current successful volunteer military, only those who wish to serve need do so. Those who do not wish to serve need not do so and are not threatened by the prospect of conscripted military service. With a draft, these latter would be threatened with military service and, Rep. Rangel believes, many would respond like in the sixties and express their personal reluctance to participate by opposition to the war itself.

Think back to the Vietnam protests. They did not originate among the poor and uneducated. They originated among college students who did not wish to participate, who did not wish to be drafted, and who did not wish to be called on to risk their lives fighting for their country. (At least not in ‘this’ war which, lucky for them, is an unjust war.) It is their counterparts today whom Rep Rangel seeks to mobilize by re-instituting the draft.

The Left persists in claiming that Iraq is another Vietnam. It is not because, among a great many other things, during the Vietnam War we had a draft and today an all volunteer military is fighting the Iraq War. By re-instituting the draft, Rep Rangel seeks to turn the Iraq War into another Vietnam War, as the Left remembers it, complete with the campus protests that ultimately led to our withdrawal and defeat in Vietnam.

The Left would, no doubt, be self-righteously congratulatory of themselves were that to occur, just as they were the previous time. That their victories are also U.S. defeats only adds to their self-perceived luster since, it turns out, both wars were unjust. So it would have been immoral for them to place their personal safety at risk by submitting to conscription into an unjust war.

Never mind that during the Vietnam War the Lefts argument regarding the draft was quite different. Then, their argument was that the draft discriminated against the poor because the rich could, through such instruments as college deferments and familial influence, avoid the draft while the poor could not. There seems to be no situation within which the Left cannot find a case for Republicans treating the poor deficiently.

Not to mention, because the Left never does, the millions of Vietnamese and Cambodian lives that were then sacrificed nor the millions of Iraqi and neighboring lives that would now be sacrificed in exchange for the subsequent great humanitarian cease fires of which the Left is so proud and beyond which their world view seems not to extend. They call this ‘reality’.

So, Rep Charles Rangel is being disingenuous regarding his reasons for wanting to re-institute the draft so that certain others can be disingenuous regarding why they are protesting the Iraq War. Were the former not true, the statistical facts would support Rep Rangels' position. Were the latter not true, those certain others would be protesting the Iraq War now even without being threatened by a draft.