Just Desertion

"The president carries the biggest burden, obviously. He's the one who has to make the decision to commit young Americans, but we are fortunate to have a group of men and women, the all-volunteer force, who voluntarily put on the uniform and go in harm's way for the rest of us."

Dick "Cthulhu" Cheney, the incarnate expression of unfiltered evil, discussing the completely useless and unjustified death of 4,000 Americans in the Idiot King's illegal war



Does anyone living where reasoning bears sway honestly believe that George W. Bush, whose brow has never known the sweat of honest labor or been furrowed in socially useful thought, is "burdened" by his whimsical decision to send Americans to kill and die in Iraq?


Is there anybody -- apart from Sean Hannity and other cerebrally-challenged and character-deficient partisan whores -- who would profess to believe that Bush, who lives in the cushion of unparalleled luxury, travels in a cocoon of impenetrable security, and whose every transient appetite is immediately satisfied, groans under a burden comparable in any way to an American GI on his second, third, fourth, or fifth tour of duty in Iraq?



















Buck up, soldier: Bush the Dumber contemplates the burdens of the Iraq War as he prepares for a mountain bike ride (above); he courageously conceals the anguish of his soul while polluting a golf course (below).


With his "surge" proving to be a pointless, cynical exercise in marketing, Bush has blithely let it be known that a "pause" will take place in the process of withdrawing troops from Iraq. This means that tens of thousands of Americans who had dared entertain the hope of returning to their families and putting the war behind them have had seen those hopes ruthlessly crushed.



Some of them won't return. Many others won't return whole in body, mind, or soul.


Some will see their marriages end, their families disintegrate, their civilian jobs evaporate, or their homes foreclosed on as a result of repeated deployments to Iraq. But their burdens are trivial, according to Cheney. They are mere trifles compared to the sufferings of our divine Emperor-King.


The American Conservative recently reported that the 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment "just returned to Iraq for a fifth tour." That unit includes Reymondo Parra, who has already earned two Purple Hearts in Iraq. The "signature wound" of this war, notes the magazine, is IED-inflicted traumatic brain injury.


Thousands of Americans have been left incapacitated by IED attacks. And "even those who escape without visible damage are experiencing long-term effects," American Conservative observes. "One in six troops sustains at least one concussion in Iraq, and of those reporting loss of consciousness, 44 percent go on to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Symptoms include sleep problems, psychological disruption, and social adjustment issues.... One immediate tally is rising at an alarming rate: in 2007, suicide among active-duty soldiers reached its highest level since the Army began keeping records, up 20 percent from the year before."


But surely, as Cheney insists, the unseen wounds inflicted on our all-compassionate Emperor are graver and deeper still. Sure, he seems to be an vindictive, incurably superficial dimwit who is proudly indifferent to the facts, contemptuously dismissive of anything but his own desires and assumptions, and who sleeps the untroubled sleep of a sociopath. But ... that's just a brave front, y'all, albeit a very convincing one. His is actually a soul of such trackless depths that he can't help but mourn the loss of every single soldier, and feel every tremor of their pain.


Well ... maybe not.


It's hardly uncommon to hear people speaking obscenities. Dick Cheney, as the comment quoted above reminds us, is himself an obscenity.


His reflexive reaction to a question about the protracted agonies being inflicted on military personnel and their families by the political class is to demean those sufferings while casually asserting a proprietary claim on their lives: The soldiers volunteered, Cheney insists, which means that we (those at the top of the oligarchy) can do with them as we please for as long as we want.


The question that prompted Cheney's obscene remarks dealt with the practice of "stop-loss," which is probably the most brazen of the numerous ways the Regime unilaterally redefines the terms of an enlisted man's service contract.


Stop-loss orders are a form of conscription. They impose an involuntary extension of a soldier's enlistment period, irrespective of the specific terms of the service contract.


Joshua Key, who enlisted in the Army in 2002 and served seven months in Iraq, recalls asking his sergeant about the sanctity of the contract he had signed -- and his sergeant's Cheneyesque reply.


The conversation began with Key asking "What's the point" of the war. He was part of a unit that routinely raided Iraqi homes in search of supposed terrorists and arms caches, only to find neither -- even though every male taller than five feet in height was routinely zip-cuffed and taken away to heaven only knows where.


What's the point of this? Key asked his sergeant.


"There is no point -- it's just your job," came the reply.


"But what's the justification for this war?" Key persisted with touching, if misplaced, faith in human reason.


"The justification is that you signed a contract and you're told to be here," pronounced the sergeant, channeling Cthulhu with remarkable fidelity.


"But when do I get to go home?" Key pressed, no doubt with a growing sense of disillusionment.


"Private," the sergeant hissed, "we can keep you here just as long as we want, and we ain't never got to send you home."


Key wasn't afraid of combat. He came from a small, economically depressed Oklahoma community in which fighting and firearms were common. Violence was also common during his distressed upbringing. He actually enjoyed basic training, and was blessed with an impressive skill-set (he was an adept welder and automotive mechanic) that made him very valuable.


But he couldn't abide the sense that he had become implicated in a hideous, world-historic crime as the result of a bait-and-switch.


Yes, he did sign an enlistment contract.


Sure, the recruiter had told him to conceal the fact that he and his wife already had two children and a third on the way -- a status which would disqualify him from enlisting.


Sure, the same recruiter had likewise told him to keep to himself the fact that he was seriously in debt -- another impediment to both Joshua's enlistment, and the recruiter making his quota.


And, well, sure, the same recruiter had promised him, in all apparent sincerity, that Joshua would be given "nondeployable" status as a bridge-builder for the Army Corps of Engineers.


"You're going to be building bridges from nine to five every day and spending every evening home with the family," lied the recruiter, who scribbled the acronym CONUS -- for "Continental United States" -- on the enlistment contract as supposed surety of this agreement. Asked later for supplemental reassurance, the recruiter promised that "Because of your growing family, you would be the last person sent overseas."


All of this took place in 2002. In 2003, Key was among the first to be sent to Iraq.


His training at Fort Carson clearly anticipated that deployment: During bayonet drills, he and the other recruits were urged, "Kill! Kill! Kill the sand niggers!" The rules of engagement, he was told, were quite simple: "If you feel threatened, kill first and ask questions later."


His training with C-4 explosives was sometimes set to an inventively depraved cadence that could just as easily have been chanted by trainees at an al-Qaeda camp in Pakistan: "Take a playground, fill it full of kids; drop on some napalm, and barbecue some ribs."


Where his unit was concerned, Joshua writes, "Iraqis were not people at all -- they were terrorists, suicide bombers, sand niggers, and ragheads..... We were taught to think of Iraqis in degrading ways during military training, and those attitudes crossed the oceans with us when we flew into battle."


Although he and his comrades came under enemy fire on numerous occasions, they never fixed their sights on actual combatants: They "were on the run and gone while we were still diving for cover against flying shrapnel. We fought back by lashing out at civilians who had no means to defend themselves. It seemed the only way we could fight back -- but it was wrong."


Shortly after Joshua's above-quoted conversation with his sergeant, he went on patrol with another sergeant named Fernandez. As their APC passed beneath a grove of palm trees, Joshua described how easy it would be to ambush the unit. "To my surprise," Joshua recalls, "the sergeant did not lecture me for speaking my mind. Softly, he told me, `I'd do the same thing if people invaded America.'"


That brief conversation catalyzed Joshua's misgivings about the war. If a foreign power occupied the United States, if its soldiers "blasted into my home and terrorized my family," Joshua writes, "I would become a force to be reckoned with. I would invent my own booby traps and come up with the most unexpected methods of mayhem. I would give the occupiers hell and keep at it until I was dead and gone, twice over."


For this reason, Joshua decided that he was fighting the wrong war, the wrong way, against the wrong enemy. The real enemy was at his back -- the Decider Guy, his adult handler, and the Power Elite they represent. They had orchestrated the horrors in Iraq and taken cynical advantage of those who enlisted in the mistaken belief that they would take part in the actual defense of our country.


Joshua was deceived into signing his contract, misled about the cause and purpose of the war, and put into a position in which would be among those who would be sent into Iraq as many times as the Grand and Glorious Decider considered necessary, to kill and terrorize people for no reason that made sense.


So when he was sent back to the United States on furlough, Joshua excused himself from any further responsibility for a supposed commitment that had been made in bad faith. Because the Government ruling us didn't obey the terms of its contract, Joshua simply quit. This meant that he and his family (which has now grown to include four children) had to flee to Canada, since the Regime still claims the supposed right to murder soldiers who decide to quit their jobs and seek other employment.


Joshua describes that experience, as well as those recounted above and a few too horrifying to contemplate, in his book The Deserter's Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq.


(Continues after the jump.)

















Some wounds can't be seen, and will never heal: A US soldier weeps in anguish as a young Iraqi girl dies in his arms. Some American servicemen, according to Joshua Key, have been trained to dehumanize the Iraqis. Obviously, many of them (such as Key himself) either weren't given that indoctrination, or simply retain the innate decency inscribed on their hearts by the Creator. For them, and for many others, the Iraq war will continue to be hell long after it ends, assuming that it ever does.


A contract that is binding only on one party, and can be revised at will by the other party, isn't a contract in any sense I can recognize. The Regime claims that it can extend the period of service required of enlistees; equity demands that enlistees be able to abbreviate their service at will as well, perhaps forfeiting some portion of their enlistment bonus in the process.


If we truly had a volunteer military, would "desertion" be a crime? I can't see how it could be. Under the Nuremberg Principles, there are times when desertion, or something closely akin to it, is a moral imperative. This is a point made by Joshua Key, Ehren Watada, Ricky Clousing, and other defecting soldiers who have properly described the Iraq War as illegal, immoral, and insupportable.


It will be recalled that George W. Bush, whose Vietnam Era military "service" was of a piece with his seamlessly privileged life, unilaterally redefined the terms of his own enlistment contract to suit his fancy, and suffered no punishment of any kind.


Ah, but surely Providence spared the young Bushling such torments, foreknowing the grievous burdens he would eventually have to bear as he sent less privileged Americans off to fight in Iraq.

















Dum spiro, pugno!

Down With the Draft! or How Ron Paul Could Win

John Edwards may have performed an unintended service for the Ron Paul presidential campaign.

First, he has decided to position himself as an anti-war candidate, a move that attests to the political potency of that issue.

Second, Edwards has endorsed the proposal to re-institute slavery in the form of conscription, for both military and non-military purposes. This exposes him as a consummate fraud and opportunist, a fact that will throw Dr. Paul's authentic anti-war convictions into sharp relief. Edwards has also handed the Paul campaign a nearly ideal unifying element to build a youth movement that could – I'm not saying that it will, but that it could – redefine the 2008 electoral landscape.

Through the simple and repeated act of telling the unadorned truth about the impact and consequences of Washington's imperial foreign policy, Rep. Paul ignited the blogosphere, infuriated the gatekeepers of the Bu'ushist cult, and provoked astonished approval from those parts of the voting public who want to be treated as adults. His message, digested to its essence, is that our rulers have led our nation into disrepute and impending bankruptcy by bullying the rest of the world – and that this must stop immediately if we are to have any prospect of avoiding outright dictatorship and penury.

Rarely, if ever, has a national political figure of any stature called attention so forcefully to the inescapable connection between an imperial foreign policy abroad, and the constriction of liberty at home. And the fashion in which Dr. Paul has done so – speaking the truth in language devoid of cant or other rhetorical artifacts, retaining his composure and avuncular dignity amid the theatrical faux outrage of Establishment lickspittles (yeah, I'm talking to you, Hannity) and aspiring dictators (yo, that's you, Rudy) – has elevated his message above Republican primary politics: He has achieved trans-partisan status by speaking about freedom as the “common ground.”

I suspect that Dr. Paul's success in capturing the public imagination through an anti-imperialist campaign influenced John Edwards to re-brand himself as an anti-Iraq War candidate. But there is nothing principled about Edwards' current position: It would have taken a measure of courage to oppose the war clearly and forcefully in March 2003, as Ron Paul did.

Every other presidential aspirant on either side of the narrow Donkey/Pachyderm divide is a collectivist of some variety – from militarist nationalists like John McCain and Tom Tancredo to technocratic corporatists like Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton. John Edwards is trying to get some of that post-New Deal-labor movement-popular front Mojo going for him by opposing the war and calling for enactment of the eighth plank of the Communist Manifesto, which dictates a “universal liability of all to serve” as the State ordains.

“One of the things we ought to be thinking about is some level of mandatory service to our country, so that everybody in America – not just the poor kids who get sent to war – are serving this country,” Edwards said Sunday (May 20) during a stop in Keene, New Hampshire. “We have people from all walks of life in America who are serving, including Reservists and National Guard. What we want to do is to have all Americans to have a chance to serve their country.”

Hey, don't think of it as a death sentence -- think of it as a "chance to serve your country" (in your case, as the main course).

I am constantly amazed by the unctuous dishonesty with which collectivists describe servitude as an “opportunity.” The words “mandatory” and “opportunity” are blood enemies. Those who force them into an unnatural marriage remind me of a story I came across years ago in a book entitled Showa: The Age of Hirohito.

As the Pacific War was grinding down, a Japanese commander summoned a squadron of fighter pilots and told them that they had received an opportunity to die for the Emperor in Kamikaze attacks. Each of them was handed two ballots and ordered to choose the one that best described his attitude regarding that opportunity; one ballot read “willing,” the other “very willing.”

The fearful summons: The State steals a young man's future.

Such is always the case when the State and those running it, out of their boundless generosity and magnanimity, extent to the rest of us an “opportunity” to surrender our time, property, and lives in the State's service. Our “privilege” in this transaction is to submit with docility – nay, with happy gratitude – to whatever imposition our rulers see fit to inflict on us, including the surrender of our lives in their service.

This is emphatically not the same thing as serving our country. Every individual who provides any useful service, whether as a volunteer, an employee, or a businessman, is serving our country. Collectivists believe that coercion is the magic ingredient that makes State-imposed “service” morally superior to private industriousness. They have the sovereign right to luxuriate in their delusions. Should they seek to inflict them on my family, they will do so at their mortal peril.

I am utterly and completely serious.

Conscription is chattel slavery of the most pernicious variety. It is intrinsically immoral and entirely unconstitutional. The Bible records that when apostate Israel sought a king, the prophet Samuel offered a detailed warning of the tyranny and corruption the monarchy would bring in its train; the very first curse he mentioned was conscription.

Conscripts were employed in King George III's war against the American colonies, along with enlistees and mercenaries. On one occasion, writes Stanley Weintraub in his splendid book Iron Tears: America's Battle for Freedom, Britain's Quagmire, 1175-1783, “A group of hungry [British] soldiers on short rations were shot while foraging for potatoes in an open field, and [General Sir John] Burgoyne warned, `The life of the soldier is the property of the king' – and that any Redcoat caught venturing beyond British lines would be `instantly hanged.'”

"The life of the soldier is the property of the king." Or president. Or dictator.

Such is the nature of conscription, which is why it has no place in any society that claims to be free.

In defending the Lincoln regime's imposition of conscription during the War Between the States, the New York Times published a house editorial on July 13, 1863 that digested the case for the draft to one simple proposition” “[O]ur national authority has the right under the Constitution, to every dollar and every right arm in the country for its protection....” (Emphasis added) As I've pointed out before, this makes obvious the fact that through conscription, the subjects exist to protect the government, rather than the government existing to protect citizens.

Bernard Baruch, Woodrow Wilson's commissar for war production, was similarly blunt in his description of the WWI-era “war socialism” system for which conscription provided a foundation:

“Every man’s life is at the call of the nation and so must be every man’s property. We are living today in a highly organized state of socialism. The state is all; the individual is of importance only as he contributes to the welfare of the state. His property is his only as the state does not need it. He must hold his life and possessions at the call of the state.”

Edwards wants to remove U.S. Troops from Iraq, while designing a “strategic plan” to deal with the genocidal inter-communal war that has been made inevitable by US intervention. This would require a large permanent US presence in the region, and almost certainly mean involvement in military conflicts beyond Iraq. This, in turn, will mean expanding the ranks of the military through involuntary servitude, with civilian “service” being treated as a concomitant civic responsibility.

Assuming that Muslim radicals hate us for our freedom, the Edwards approach would solve that problem by extinguishing freedom.

Ron Paul's approach is much better: End the war, bring the troops home, resume the practice of genuinely even-handed diplomacy abroad, and reduce the size and expense of domestic government by several orders of magnitude. Opposition to conscription is an obvious and indispensable element of that program, and one that would capture the attention of freedom-focused young people.

Ron Paul's anti-imperialist campaign has already gone viral. Imagine how his campaign would expand and prosper if he mounted a youth appeal focusing on a promise not to let the State steal their future through conscription.

Thanks...

... are due to Kevin and Ellen Bearly for the exceptional generosity they displayed to me and my family while I was in Los Angeles to address the United Republicans of California convention last Saturday. Kevin and Ellen opened their home to Korrin, Katrina, Sophia and me, fed us extravagantly, and treated us with amazing kindness.

I'd also like to thank UROC for inviting me to speak, Scott Watson and family for helping with the travel arrangements, Marvin Pro-Life Richardson (his legal name is, simply, Pro-Life) and family for billeting our sons over the weekend, and Robert Malaby for inviting me to speak at the Bible Missionary Church in Pomona on Sunday. God bless all of you!

Please be sure to drop by The Right Source!

From "Surge" to Slavery

If you want a good measure of how little the Regime cares for its subjects, consider this fact:

Members of local draft boards, who would be given the power to make life and death decisions regarding deferments or exemptions in the likely event that Congress decides to create a slave army, are required to receive only four hours of training each year.

Our nation is afflicted with 2,000 of the five-member draft boards – I prefer to call them Selective Slavery Soviets (SSS). Their members are appointed by the president, and the selection criteria aren't particularly demanding. And to judge from comments made by members of various boards to the press, the most important qualification is an eagerness to serve the interests of the State, rather than its victims.

“If there is a draft,” comments Steve Zurawski, who belongs to a draft board in Chicago, “we go into action. It's a necessary evil.”

That description is exactly half right. To fight a defensive war, a draft is never necessary. Conscription only becomes “necessary” when policy-makers are pursuing evil objectives.

Another draft board member, Jack McInerey Jr., insists that it's wise to keep the SSS network up and running, because otherwise “it would take a minimum of six weeks to organize a draft.”

“Do you want to give your enemy a month and a half to attack your nation?” asks McInerey. “I don't think so.”

Notes the Chicago Sun-Times: “The idea of mandatory military service in the United States can be traced back as far as the Revolutionary War, but the concept of panels of community members to help with the process did not appear until World War I.”

Note how subtly the author of that sentence misleads the reader by tracing the “idea” -- but not the practice – of conscription back to the founding era. The idea of a military draft was considered and rejected by those who drafted the U.S. Constitution.

On May 29, 1787 -- the first working session of the Philadelphia Convention -- Virginia Governor Edmund Randolph presented a detailed dissection of the Articles of Confederation and its deficiencies. The very first liability listed by Randolph, as recorded in James Madison’s Notes, was the fact that the Articles “produced no security against foreign invasion; congress not being permitted to prevent a war nor to support it by their own authority….”

With respect to matters of national defense, the chief weakness of Congress under the Articles of Confederation was its inability to raise money to pay recruits, by Randolph's reckoning.

Where it was necessary to muster troops to defend the Confederation, Randolph continued, with “neither militia nor draughts [drafts] being fit for defense on such occasions, enlistments only could be successful and these could not be executed without money."

Note this well: Randolph, a figure of no small consequence at the Convention, acknowledged that drafts are not “fit for defense” in the event of a sudden attack on our nation.

While Randolph and other Federalists at the Convention insisted that a stronger central government was necessary in order to defend the infant American republic from foreign aggression, their proposed remedy was to provide Congress with the means to raise money to pay a small professional army. Not once during the debates at the Convention was it suggested that the central government should have the authority to conduct a draft of the general population. Agreement was reached that the federal government – through Congress – could call state militia to the active defense of the union, but that the states would not completely surrender control over the militia.

The session of August 18 dealt with that question in some detail. A compromise was proposed by George Mason empowering the central government to create a “select militia,” which he considered “as much as the General Government could advantageously be charged with.” This suggestion failed to find favor with many of the delegates, as was referred to a select committee for further study.

When the issue was taken up again on August 23, the discussion focused on the power of Congress to regulate and discipline militia called to defend the union.

From those discussions emerged the congressional power to “raise armies” (with a two-year limitation on appropriations for the army) and to call the militia into the service of the United States when necessary for the common defense. Once again, none of the delegates suggested that Congress, or any other branch of the federal government, would be permitted to conscript citizens into a national army.

“After circumscribing the central government’s power to draw the militia into federal service with such careful restrictions, the delegates could not possibly have allowed the federal government to exercise direct control over the citizens by permitting a draft into the regular army,” observed legal scholar Leon Friedman in a 1969 Michigan Law Review article. “The matter was so impossible to imagine, given the circumstances and ideological climate of the times, that no voice was raised against it…. All that was given by the grant [to Congress of limited power to raise armies, and call out the state militia], was the power to organize and enlist a federal, professional army which – the delegates thought – would consist of a limited number of garrison troops. That power was given grudgingly, only in the light of the severe hardship Congress had experienced through the Revolution in depending solely on the states for manpower and military supplies.”

The idea that citizens could be compelled “to bear arms for a national authority, and work against their most profound interests, never occurred to the framers,” continues Friedman. To endorse that concept “would have been a contradiction to their entire political heritage, manifestly inconsistent with their sense of the delicate balance between liberty and power, between the appetite for oppression and the instinct for resistance. If the citizen had any military obligation, it was to his local militia.

Many of the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence were inspired by abuses of military power by the British Government at expense of the rights of the colonists. Similarly, many of the provisions inscribed in the Constitution and Bill of Rights (such as the limitation of appropriations for the Army to two years, and the Third Amendment’s prohibition of the quartering of troops in private homes) were inspired by well-entrenched, and amply validated, American concerns about the potential danger of military establishments being employed against the people as occupation forces.

Given the care with which the Framers of the Constitution hedged and qualified congressional power to create military establishments, it is untenable to believe that they granted Congress the power of conscription.

It is true that several of the states had mechanisms to conscript citizens into militias. The chief purpose of those bodies, however, was not to fight on behalf of the union, but rather to defend each state in the event of internal insurrection or other crises (such as conflicts with Indians). While Congress had the power to call militias into service of the union, it was clearly understood that the militias could also be called into service to defend individual states from a rogue central government – a form of interposition explicitly endorsed by Madison in Federalist essay 46.

Once again, this fact is impossible to reconcile with the idea that the central government had the power under the Constitution to conscript the very militiamen upon whom the states would rely as an ultimate check against that same central government.

The War of 1812 came about, in large measure, because of the British government’s practice of “impressing” American citizens – that is, abducting American sailors on the high seas, accusing them of being deserters from the British Navy, and forcing them to serve aboard British ships. Thus it’s reasonable to say that the war was, to some extent, based on a profound opposition to conscription, albeit in this case conducted by a foreign regime.

In our nation’s republican infancy, the citizens of most states looked on the federal government in Washington as something akin to a potentially hostile foreign power (an attitude desperately in need of revival, in my view). Despite misgivings about the necessity and ultimate purposes of the war, Americans – even those in restive New England -- were willing to enlist in both militia units and the regular Army in order to defend the union from Great Britain.

However, widespread disaffection and mutiny spread through both the militia and the Army after it became clear that the “War Hawks” in the Madison administration sought to expand the war into Canada. Governors of New England states refused to act on requisitions of militia for a march on Montreal, and “guardhouse lawyers” descended on militia camps to inform soldiers that the federal government had no constitutional authority to deploy them in foreign wars.

“Rigid Republican doctrine, apart from party loyalty, also harmed the war effort,” records historian Robert Allen Rutland. “Republican views concerning the use of the state militia proved to be a genuine albatross [to President Madison and his administration]. In 1798 Republicans had argued that the Constitution limited the use of the militia (today’s National Guard) to executing federal laws within its borders, suppressing insurrections, and repelling invasions. Could the president call on the militia to invade Canada or the Floridas [at the time not part of the United States]? No, said doctrinaire Republicans and Federalists alike….”

This consensus against using the militia as a foreign expeditionary force was complemented with an equally widespread rejection of conscription – even after the land war against Great Britain took a disastrous turn.

By June 1814, the U.S. Treasury was depleted, the federal government’s credit lines were stretched tauter than a Hollywood face-lift, Napoleon had been neutralized by a British-led coalition (meaning that London would soon be able to turn its attentions toward the U.S.), and peace negotiations were stalling. Madison instructed his negotiators at the peace table to drop the U.S. demand that British end the practice of impressment .

Ironically, the U.S. peace negotiators who had previously demanded an end to impressment operated under the authority of Secretary of State James Monroe – who, as Secretary of War, would later submit the proposal for a U.S. military draft.

Within weeks, this diplomatic retreat was matched by a literal retreat after Washington, D.C. came under British naval bombardment. On August 24, President Madison fled into the woods as British troops burned the White House. First Lady Dolley Madison, seeking to protect official papers, household china, and a portrait of George Washington, left the presidential residence literally minutes ahead of advancing British troops. (A freak – or perhaps providential – tornado, coupled with the explosion of a nearby powder magazine, deterred British troops from actually sacking the White House.)

Losing ground in a desperate war with the world’s most powerful empire, suffering the indignity of an attack on our Capitol City and its most visible symbol, the United States faced a crisis unlike any it has experienced either before or since.

Indeed, the situation in which our nation found itself in late 1814-early 1815 provides an ideal test case for one of the arguments favored by some reluctant proponents of the draft: The claim that in the event of a foreign attack that literally threatens our national survival, conscription may be necessary as an ultimate means of national self-defense.

Compelling as that argument may seem to those who consider it hypothetically, the remarkable fact is that it was rejected by Congress when our nation actually confronted the possibility of losing the war to Great Britain.

The Monroe conscription proposal was placed before Congress in December 1814. The immediate congressional reaction – primarily from Republicans, but also from some Federalists – was one of astonished outrage.

“The power claimed is, doubtless, vastly greater and more dangerous than any other possessed by the Government,” protested Senator Jeremiah Mason of New Hampshire. “It subjects the personal freedom of every citizen, in comparison with which the rights of property are insignificant, to the arbitrary discretion [of government]. Had there been the intention of granting such power, would there not have been some attempt to guard against the unjust and oppressive exercise of it, as was done in the granting of power less important?”

Mason scored a telling point by recalling that the Madison administration had described impressment – which he described as a form of naval conscription -- as “utterly repugnant to our constitution and laws.” “The honorable Secretary [James Monroe] when he drafted those instructions, knew not how soon he should be directed to contend for the contrary doctrine.”

Easily the most eloquent and forceful opponent of the conscription proposal was Congressman Daniel Webster of Massachusetts.

“It was `usurpation’ pure and simple, cried Webster,” recalls biographer Robert Remini. “If such as bill is attempted, he warned, `it will cause a storm such as was never witnessed before.’ But the government was desperate. It had no money, and its army was slowly evaporating. In addition, many states had refused repeated requests for militia troops.

One version of Monroe’s plan did pass the Senate (remarkable, in light of the fact that the Senate as then constituted was intended to represent the interests of the state governments). Describing the plan as “wicked and violent,” Webster warned that it “will be a dead letter in New England.” Angered that proponents of the draft insisted that it was authorized by “implied powers,” rather than by any specific grant of power in the Constitution, Webster eviscerated the proposed draft in a lengthy speech on December 9:

“Is this, sir, consistent with the character of a free government? Is this civil liberty? Is this the real character of our Constitution? No sir, indeed it is not. The Constitution is libeled, foully libeled. The people of this country have not established for themselves such a fabric of despotism…. Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly or the wickedness of government may engage it?…. If the Secretary of War has proved the right of Congress to enact a law enforcing a draft of men out of the militia and into the regular army, he will at any time be able to prove, quite as clearly, that Congress has the power to create a Dictator.”(Spelling in the original.)

If Congress approved this patently unconstitutional and undeniably despotic measure, Webster continued, “It will be the solemn duty of the State Governments to protect their own authority over their own militia, and interpose between their citizens and arbitrary power. These are among the objects for which the State Governments exist; and their highest obligations bind them to the preservation of their own rights and the liberties of their people.”

The conscription proposal was conspicuous on the agenda of the Hartford Convention, which met shortly after Webster delivered his speech. Far from contributing to the defense of the Union, the proposed draft helped fuel a movement that very nearly tore it apart.


A little more than a week ago, Congressman Charles Rangel of New York introduced the "Universal National Service Act of 2007," which would not only re-instate the draft, it would extend it to all Americans of both sexes from ages 18 to 42. This measure is a transliteration of the eighth plank of the Communist Manifesto, which dictates a universal liability for all to serve as the state directs.


Rangel's bill would make all Americans from ages 18 to 42 the property of the President, to use as he sees fit in either military, homeland security, or other "national service" functions. The bill is written in such a fashion that it would provide a new pool of conscripts for immediate use in Iraq and Afghanistan if -- make that when -- the "surge" results in a larger and bloodier mess in the Middle East.


Who are the five people in your community who would have life-and-death power over the future of your children? Now is a good time to find out.

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