Say what you will about Jimmy Carter — I thought he was a pretty awful president in many ways, quite frankly — he has certainly brought attention to one of the greatest injustices of our time, for which effort he will undoubtedly be attacked ad derided as an anti-Semite. I must say, I have a great deal more respect for him this week than I did last. The guy has, more than any other ex-president in living memory, distinguished himself through his philanthropic work, earning the Nobel Peace Prize and the admiration of many. Rather than being content to settle back on his laurels and enjoy retirement, he has instead chosen to wade hip deep into one of the most acrimonious political issues going — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Carter is using his considerable prestige to gain a broad public hearing for what has long been the international consensus solution for that conflict, namely the end of Israeli rule over that less than one-quarter of mandate Palestine they’ve occupied since June 1967. He has also shone a light on the Palestinian experience in a way that is seldom (if ever) seen on U.S. television.

Of course, the Chuck Krauthammers of the world will remind us of every bad decision Carter has ever made, every war crime committed by a Palestinian, every concession they claim Israel has tried to make through the decades, to its own detriment. They will invoke the existential threat posed by extremists like Amadinejad and Nasrallah and claim that Israel’s 1967 borders were indefensible. Bullshit. Unlike in 1967, Israel does not now face a hostile Egypt, a hostile Jordan, a hostile Iraq. It is clear that the occupied territories and the plight of Palestinians both there and scattered throughout the region remain the only real obstacles to normal relations, with the possible exception of Israel’s formidable nuclear arsenal, still undeclared and yet undeniably real. Fact is, with the continued occupation of that small part of Palestine that was left to the Palestinians after 1948, Israel’s more expansive borders are indefensible precisely because those territories are filled with legions of people whose lives are being crushed by the mad pursuit of a greater Israel. It’s a pretty tight neighborhood, and the only way to have good neighbors is to be one.

Then there’s Amadinejad. What a gift to Israeli and American hawks that man is! His ludicrous fulminations provide them with the ammunition they need to maintain perpetual military confrontation. And the best part about him is that he doesn’t even run Iran. He is as powerless as Khatami was before him, subject to the will of Iran’s supreme clerical leader, the Ayatollah Khamenie. So he presents a pretty low-grade threat to any state that possesses enough conventional and non-conventional weapons to reduce the region to rubble. Add to that the fact that Israel’s politicians (to say nothing of their U.S. counterparts) regularly threaten Iran with attack, and it should come as no surprise that Iran might contemplate building their own nuclear deterrent (though it appears this remains in the contemplative stage at present). With his observations about the Palestinians, Carter is trying to defuse the bomb that is the modern Middle East… and as a result, he will no doubt be lumped together with the bomb-throwers.

All I can say to him is what my mom always told me: No good deed goes unpunished. If you feel resistance, you’re probably doing the right thing.

luv u,

jp

Charles Rangel (D-NY) has again raised the subject of reinstituting the military draft as a way of ensuring that the prospect of war will be treated by the powerful and well-connected with the kind of seriousness it merits. Of course, the proposal will go nowhere, but the reaction to it is always interesting. NPR’s resident political sports commentator Cokie Roberts, for instance, pointed out that people volunteer for today’s military, that they are there because they want to be there, and that, anyway, the military doesn’t want a draft. There’s a civics lesson in this somewhere, I’m sure of it. You won’t get that from me (unqualified, for sure), but this reaction is certainly worth a closer look.

Sure, people volunteer for the military, but very often they do so on the basis of some pretty specious recruiting claims (not to mention glitzy advertising that you and I pay for). Many times they come from depressed communities where there are few options for high school graduates to get an education, start a career, or even just find a decent-paying job. As far as wanting to be there is concerned, my first question is, wanting to be where? Iraq? Doubt it. There hasn’t yet been massive desertion or near insurrection like there was in Vietnam, but then these are, again, volunteers many of whom entered the armed forces not simply because they wanted to serve their country, but because they hoped to either make a career in the military or find a career through the experience. That and the culture of the modern military makes disobedience much, much more difficult than it would be for a draftee who didn’t want to be in the service in the first place.

Finally, the question of whether or not the military wants a draft seems kind of irrelevant to me. Last time I looked, they took their orders from the elected civilian leadership and not the other way around. (They didn’t particularly want to go into Iraq either, and look where we are.) Their reluctance stems, of course, from the Vietnam experience, but what the hell — people were drafted into America’s wars long before Vietnam. Was the problem… Is the problem the draft or the fact that the war was plainly wrong and immoral and no one wanted to fight it? Seems to me it’s the latter. What really bugs people about the draft is that it puts us in a situation where we can’t get into a war unless it obviously needs to be fought — i.e. that there is no alternative.

There’s another basic moral question here; one that Cokie and crew are unlikely to address. Just because people are willing to do our fighting for us, that doesn’t mean we should feel free to sent them on some hopeless, pointless, gratuitous mission like invading and occupying Iraq. I think Rangel’s point is that general conscription would make the decision to go to war a matter of keen interest to every part of society, from penniless kids in Appalachia and south Bronx to ivy league-bound prepsters and their parents. I find it grimly amusing that people are encouraged think of the Vietnam era as a time when people didn’t support U.S. troops and that today we’re behind them all the way. Back in the sixties, if you were an 18-year-old man, you were about two inches away from being a troop yourself. You likely had good friends and/or family members in the service — maybe a cousin, an uncle, or a brother overseas — and you were watching the mails for that draft notice. It’s nothing like that today. Nowadays, people slap a magnetic ribbon on their bumper and you’d think they just came back from a freaking U.S.O. show.

What the fuck — Cheney was no anti-war protester in the sixties; just a selfish slug who was unwilling to push himself away from his Thanksgiving dinner to get shot at in Vietnam. And while people criticize sixties radicals no end, the Cheney model is the one we all follow today.

luv u,

jp