Originally posted by andymike
As bad as a draft sounds, just think, you could be living over there where the ruler told you what to do or you had your head cut off. Or like in Korea, by law you must do X number of years in the service or goto jail.

People are so fast to jump up and say what they hate about where they live, but just think... It could be a LOT worse. :specs:
Eh I dunno about that. The whole reason we - the United States of America - profess to having an entitlement to impose our influence upon others and lead this supposed campaign to spread democracy and freedom across the world is because we say it can't get worse. Not here.

No... we won't chop of someone's head for pissin' on an effigy of Bush.
No... we won't kidnap and torture Ralph Nader for attempting to disrupt the established political order.
No... we won't put AKs in to the hands of 14yos and throw them in to the middle of some tribal conflict.

When we see ourselves stripped of our civil rights we're entitled to be outraged and fight it because we operate from the accepted premise that civil rights are what we deserve and are inalienably ours. We don't have to suck it up and take it just because people have had it worse in Rwanda.
When some of our troops torture and murder Iraqi civilians and prisoners, we should be outraged because we operate from and preach the idea that to do so is wrong. We can't just shrug it off because Saddam Hussein was doing it more often and at a larger scale.

We can't claim some kind of righteous or principled guidance above the standards we find fault with in others but then borrow the standards of others to excuse or own failings and shortcomings when it suits us to do so. What's wrong and right isn't determined by who is doing it or who did it first. We decided a long time ago that the draft was wrong, that a volunteer military was right, and that young people should be free to set their own course in life. That certain principles of duty and service, along with practical experience and benefits gained would encourage people to join the military of their own accord. To go back on that and abandon those notions wouldn't be acceptible because other countries have a draft. It'd be unacceptable because we, as a country, decided the draft was wrong.

I look back on the days when I first joined the service 10 years ago. And think about how young, impressionable, naive, immature, inexperienced and unwise to the world I was. As were my friends in the service at the time. We were kids. We had so limited an understanding of the world around us, had yet to experience so much in life. Fresh out of high school like the models on some of your twink sites. And to think that kids that are today like we were back then are out dying in a war that's been poorly planned, poorly executed, poorly if at all justified, poorly reasoned... pretty sorry.

GWB... Dick... Rummy... Wolfie... Condi... they all have blood on their hands. And though the American people don't seem to think they should be held accountable to that, at some point down the line and many decades from now when they're older and grayer and long since retired and pass on to meet their makers, blissfully in their sleep and of natural causes and content in their belief they accomplished something worthwhile in their lives, I hope they then wake up to an eternity of forced realization they signed the death warrants of thousands of kids whose trust they'd abused and neglected and the guilt imposed by the untold tens of thousands they condemned to die and then, finally then, are faced with the reality of how sinisterly lived their lives were.