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This week’s top news:

Pakistan High Court: US Drone Strikes Illegal: Pakistani High Court Chief Justice Dost Muhammad Khan has issued a ruling today declaring the ongoing US drone strikes against the tribal areas illegal under international law, adding that they amount to a “war crime” when they kill innocents.

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Pakistan holds elections on Saturday. More than 70 people have been killed nationwide in pre-election violence. It is encouraging that Pakistani High Court Chief Justice Dost Muhammad Khan issued a ruling on Thursday declaring US drone strikes in tribal areas in Pakistan illegal and a war crime.

I hope this election can help Pakistanis attach a much tighter leash on their own government. Unfortunately, elections rarely curb the rapacity of politicians. (America has re-learned this the hard way with practically every election since 1928.) The Lost Rights quip about democracy, wolves, and lambs has popped up fairly often lately in Pakistani tweets. Here’s a reposting of some of those tweets -

There’s a bevy of other Pakistani Twitter quotes (and some from elsewhere in Asia) reposted (with the full Twitter imagery, including author photos) at my blog entry on the Pakistani election.

Here is an NPR segment featuring a former Air Force pilot who operated drones. He describes targeting and killing people he thinks were civilians, or at least not a threat. He describes bombing a man running away, and when the smoke cleared saw the man get his leg blown off and bleed to death. He also describes killing a child in a drone strike.

VictoriaNuland

The central defense of the Obama administration’s handling of the Benghazi attacks last year is that they shouldn’t be blamed for making so many inaccurate statements about it being a spontaneous protest against an insulting video rather than a premeditated terrorist attack because even the CIA talking points held that it was the former.

Well yeah, because the White House and State Department edited the original talking points to delete any mention of it being a premeditated attack by Islamist militants. ABC News:

White House emails reviewed by ABC News suggest the edits were made with extensive input from the State Department.  The edits included requests from the State Department that references to the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Ansar al-Sharia be deleted as well references to CIA warnings about terrorist threats in Benghazi in the months preceding the attack.

Specifically, State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland requested the CIA cut out the following passage:

The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al-Qa’ida in Benghazi and eastern Libya.  These noted that, since April, there have been at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy. We cannot rule out the individuals has previously surveilled the U.S. facilities, also contributing to the efficacy of the attacks.

Nuland wrote that information should be taken out because it “could be abused by members [of Congress] to beat up the State Department for not paying attention to warnings, so why would we want to feed that either?”

The original CIA draft did say that the attacks appeared to have been “spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo [against the insulting video]” but also that the Agency could confirm the involvement of “Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qaeda.”

References to al-Qaeda-affiliated groups were taken out and were therefore completely absent from administration commentary in the days following the attack.

This does seem to be a case in which the government fiddled with the truth in order to protect itself from public scrutiny. And while Republicans are aghast at the effrontery of the administration, their gripe seems to be entirely political. They see a chance to hurt the Democrats politically in this, even as the important aspects of the Benghazi incident – like the fact that it was blowback resulting from U.S. interventionism – get completely ignored.

Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY), Gen. Stanley A. McChrystalThomas E. Ricks, meet David Sirota. Sirota, meet the other three people in the United States who regret the 40 years of conscription-free living Americans have enjoyed.

Over at Salon, Sirota, a liberal author and blogger (who took some flak last month for his less-terrible “Let’s Hope the Boston Bomber is a White American”) has asked, as is fashionable every 6-12 months, “Was ending the draft a mistake?” The subhede elaborates: “Without conscription war has become an abstraction, enabling a new “era of persistent conflict”. Drones didn’t do that, warmongering politicians didn’t do that, weak Congresses that gave the power to make war to the executive branch didn’t do that. Nope. It was ending the draft.

This column contains the same sentiments about the draft advocated by Gen. McChrystal, Ricks, and (incessantly) Congressman Rangel. Namely, if everyone, black white rich poor (now) men women, suffered the effects of war together, people would stop fighting them so damned often. (Sirota even uses Dwight Elliott Stone, the last man forced into Vietnam, to cement his case that the draft should menace everyone. Poor Stone apparently grew to embrace this idea years after trying desperately to evade conscription.)

The idea that the draft would stop perpetual war  is tempting to consider for a minute. After all, wasn’t it that sword of Damocles hanging over every middle class kid that finally made Americans say enough was enough during Vietnam? Isn’t it worth a try?

No. Because you don’t end mass-murder by enslaving enough people to maybe, eventually, piss off the masses.

War drones, for all their horrors, are at least not hundreds of thousands of enslaved men forced to fight. Piloting drones requires training. Most aspects of warfare now require much more training than in Vietnam days. This is one reason the draft is no longer popular among government. Nor is it popular among respondents to Gallup polls.

Sirota’s short piece is not as obviously offensive as Rangel’s alarming February comments about going into the military  screaming and coming out saluting the flag. But it’s nasty and sneaky and scary all the same. He’s too timid to say “Let’s Draft Our Kids” as Ricks did in The New York Times last year. Some want a draft — or “national service” — because they believe that 18-year-olds belong to the country, not themselves. Those national greatness morons — or just people who think terrorists are that powerful –  are more similar to Sirota than he might think, and they’re more honest. Sirota ends his piece with:

Well-meaning people can certainly disagree about whether a modern-day draft is a good idea or not (and it may not be). But 40 years into the all-volunteer experiment, it is clear that ending conscription was as much about giving citizens the liberty to abstain from as about quashing popular opposition to martial decisions. By design, it weakened our democratic connection to the armed forces, a connection that is the only proven safeguard against unbridled militarism.

Experiment. The implication that not enslaving men aged 19-26 is a fluke, tried, and now to be discarded. Never mind Richard Nixon, or the military, or anyone else’s motives in lifting the threat of military service off of the general population in order to make war “an abstraction.” Consider the definition of the draft — the mandate that you serve the government in the most servile fashion. You are more directly the hand of the state than in any other job.

And you may die. In Vietnam, 30 percent of the men killed were drafted (around 17,000 people). Countless men also signed up knowing they were going to be forced into the armed forces, in order to pick the least loathsome choice of branch. To say nothing of 2 million Vietnamese killed during the war, look how many American men were sacrificed  and how many — men and women, if Rangel had his way – would it take next time in order to stop the next war?

Ostensibly Sirota’s motivations for wanting a draft are good; the end of the worst thing in the world. But they’re twisted. Instead of starving the beast of militarism he wants to shove a few thousand people down its throat until it (hopefully) chokes.

Would it work? It’s possible. But it didn’t work during the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, or Vietnam. Or, it didn’t work in time for scores upon scores of thousand of men. What about them? Isn’t preventing their enslavement and slaughter also a part of opposing war?

If people suggesting a return to conscription are serious about ending war and all its miseries, they will stop spinning their wheels on bullshit columns like Sirota’s; stop coyly suggesting unpopular plans that make them sound grave and determined; and they will start opposing war, period.