Cure for war fever? Draft those over 50

Thursday, July 8, 2004 9:59 AM CDT

The problem with writing outrageous satire is that it keeps coming true in the world of politics.

Years ago, I came up with a modest proposal for reinstating the draft that never failed to get a tremendous response whenever I advocated it before college and high school audiences.

The proposal was to reinstate the draft, but only for people over 50. The biggest problem with a draft, I said, was that old people keep finding wars to fight and then sending young people off to fight and die in them.

It's heartbreaking today to read all those funeral stories about 18- and 19-year-olds, just beginning their adult lives, being sacrificed for some old Bush family grudge in a war against a country that wasn't any threat to us and had no connection to the real terrorists who were.

I believed the old men who made up reasons to go to war would be a lot more cautious about it if they were the ones who had to fight them.

Instead of sacrificing fresh-faced, young Americans who had their whole lives ahead of them, it made more sense to draft older people who already had lived full lives. A lot of them didn't have anything better to do now anyway but to sit around bars talking about how great their war experiences had been.

We wouldn't need to put young boys through boot camp and march them through swamps and call them "Maggots!" to make men out of them. It would save all that time and taxpayer expense if we drafted people who already were men.

I don't usually expect President Bush to take my advice, but clearly I underestimated just how unprepared this administration was for its mounting casualties in Iraq.

Last week, the Pentagon announced it was drafting 5,600 retired soldiers. The administration didn't call it a draft, of course. But former soldiers who completed their service years ago are going to be involuntarily uprooted from their lives and families to dodge bullets and car bombs in Iraq for a year. We used to call that being drafted.

In the "up-is-down, war-is-peace" logic of the military, these people are called Ready Reserves. The reason they're called Ready Reserves is they're not ready. Since leaving the Army, they haven't received any regular training or pay like other reserve troops do.

In Wisconsin, one of those who abruptly finds himself facing the possibility of being drafted to serve again is Tim Michels, a wealthy Ocononomoc businessman who is currently running for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate.

Michels wants to unseat Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, who opposed the war. Obviously, Michels doesn't know who his friends really are.

It's almost unprecedented in politics. A Republican politician spouting off in favor of war may actually get an opportunity to put his life where his mouth is.

At recent Republican forums, Michels has been peddling the unbelievable story that the war in Iraq is going swimmingly. He claims the only reason we don't know everything's great over there is because the anti-American media exaggerate negative news such as the deaths of more than 850 Americans.

He says friends currently serving in Iraq assure him everything is just ducky. Good news, Tim. You don't have to rely on hearsay anymore. There's nothing like a little first-hand observation to give your campaign some credibility.

We can even dream about Michels starting a trend in politics. Make it a requirement that every politician who supports sending young Americans into combat should agree to serve a year himself.

Come to think of it, Michels isn't the only Republican politician promoting this war who still owes the military some time. We shouldn't forget about all that National Guard service George W. Bush didn't bother to show up for in Alabama.

Before we start pulling retired soldiers out of their beds and putting them on planes to Iraq, maybe Bush could make up those missing months remaining on his military obligation. He's already got that flight suit he rented from a costume shop for the "Mission Accomplished" ceremony more than a year ago.

While Bush is over there, he might even have time to look around for those weapons of mass destruction.

There is a very good reason why Gen. Colin Powell was one of the few voices in the Bush administration trying to slow the giddy rush to war by a president and a vice president who had avoided military service. Powell is a soldier.

No one who has ever been in a war would want to start one unless there was no other choice.

And no one, young or old, deserves to be drafted to become, as John Kerry said opposing the Vietnam War in which he fought, the last man to die for a mistake.

Joel McNally is former editor of the Milwaukee alternative weekly Shepherd Express and appears weekly on the WMVS-TV public

television show "Interchange." His e-mail address is: jmcnally@wi.rr.com

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