Danny Westneat / Times staff columnist
McDermott plays risky draft game

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"The military draft is coming!" said a recent e-mail, one of two dozen such warnings I've received in the past month. "Bush is quietly pushing it because he needs more troops. Can't you look into this before we're all hauled off to fight?"

OK, I looked into it. It's true, there is a proposal to revive the draft. Only not from Bush — from Seattle Congressman Jim McDermott.

In fact there he was on CNN last Friday, arguing that Americans aged 18 to 26 should be conscripted into two-year terms in either the military or a civilian service.

"I think every man and woman ought to be subject to service in this country, just like the Israelis or a lot of other countries," he said.

McDermott and five other Democrats first proposed a draft before the invasion of Iraq. His aim was to desanitize the coming war, to get everyone to confront that "going to war means people dying."

"When Congress voted for the war, there was all this talk about how it was going to be conducted at 30,000 feet, with laser-guided missiles," he said yesterday.

"But this urban guerrilla warfare we're in now is a different matter. With a draft, every strata of society would have to confront possibly fighting and dying. I suspect the vote would be different."

On its merits, reviving the draft is a terrible idea. It's involuntary servitude, and by most accounts our professional military works better.

At first, McDermott's proposal seemed to me like a thin political stunt. Who is not aware that American men and women are dying in Iraq?

But then The Seattle Times printed the photo of flag-draped coffins, awaiting shipment home. The nation seemed taken aback that casualties tallied on the nightly news are real people laid to rest in boxes.
 
The depth of feeling was startling. A month ago, news outlets ran photos of American corpses hanging from a bridge in Fallujah. These images conveyed the war's brutal reality far more graphically, yet elicited little response — perhaps because there were no flags to mark the bodies as ours.

So maybe McDermott has a point. Maybe we are in denial about who is paying the real "death tax," as the bill's co-sponsor, Rep. Charlie Rangel of New York, puts it.

Maybe we need to get up close and personal with this war, to find out, each of us, just how committed we are to it.

Still, I think McDermott is playing a chancy game.

He said yesterday he wouldn't vote for his own bill because it contains a military draft. (He does support mandatory national service.)

And yet on CNN, McDermott appeared as a draft advocate; he never said his stance was symbolic or that his goal was to provoke debate. He closed by saying that "you owe it to your country" to serve.

Last week we had the first talk of reviving the draft not as an anti-war statement, but because the armed forces need fresh soldiers. Pentagon officials said it's not needed, but tacked on a hedge phrase: "not at this time."

McDermott was drafted into the Navy, in 1968, so he's no hypocrite. And he's made a good point. But he ought to table the draft talk before someone takes him up on the idea.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.

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