TV producer-pundit Lawrence O'Donnell is turning up on a lot of shows lately, mostly on MSNBC, arguing the idea that if one thinks the fighting should continue in Iraq, one has a moral obligation to enlist or to enlist one's family. Here's a snippet from one transcript…
I've reached a Rangel-like breaking point with my TV pundit colleagues who championed the Iraq war and now say we can't leave even if we went there for the wrong reasons. For every one of them, I have a simple question: Why aren't you in Iraq? Or why did you avoid combat in your generation's war? The one unifying characteristic that all of us men in make-up on political chat shows share is fear of combat. Every one of us has done everything we can to avoid combat or even being fitted for a military uniform. Just like George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Dick Cheney, we are all combat cowards. It takes a very special kind of combat coward to advocate combat for others.
That's all true, of course. None of these guys served and some of them used every possible trick to avoid serving. (Some of us were spared having to resort to that because we had high-enough numbers in the draft lottery.)
If O'Donnell's point is that you can't or shouldn't advocate for war unless you're prepared to pick up a gun, I'd disagree with that. Every election day, each of us Good Citizens is expected to mark a ballot covering a great many issues that will never impact us directly. The premise of Democracy is that we, the people, are qualified to collectively make decisions even when we have no skin in the game.
But I think it's a good thing that O'Donnell is making that argument, just as I'm glad Charles Rangel is out there, talking semi-seriously about reinstating the draft. Actions have consequences and you can't keep calling for more troops to be sent into combat without confronting that issue. Some (not all) of those who want us to be escalating and invading sure sound like they don't place too high a value on the life of an American soldier. At the very least, they seem to think there's an easy and endless supply, and we don't have to think about where they'll come from. It's vital that we not view our troops as an inexhaustible and discardable resource…and that even if we aren't sending our own kids or ourselves over to fight, we make that decision as if we were.