“Already tarnished by questions surrounding the huge no-bid reconstruction contracts won by his former company, Halliburton, in which he retains a financial interest, as well as his refusal to disclose to Congress what meetings he held during his formulation of Bush’s energy policy, Cheney is increasingly seen as a serious rightwing extremist and ideologue, and by far the most powerful number two in US history.

As much as Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and his neo-conservative advisors have become the lightning rod for criticism over the Iraq war and the administration’s hubris, Cheney appears to have acted as their principal patron and advocate with Bush himself, and more than any other official except perhaps Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the driving force within the administration for war with Iraq. ” —Asia Times

“Iraq, everyone agrees, is not Vietnam. In Vietnam the United States lost dozens of troops for every one it is losing in Iraq. The Viet Cong guerrillas had broad popular support. They were being supplied by great powers. And so on. But there is one sense in which the analogy might hold. Frustrated by the lack of quick progress on the ground and fading political support at home, Washington is now latching on to the idea that a quick transfer of power to local troops and politicians would make things better. Or at any rate, it would lower American casualties. It was called Vietnamization; today it’s called Iraqification. And then as now, it is less a winning strategy than an exit strategy.” — Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post

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Ribbit! is back!

“For literature now is in a dangerous zone where there seems to be little separation between the private act of writing and the public performance demanded of writers. Books are judged today as successful or not depending on sales and jury short lists. Meanwhile the critical climate, for all the media coverage of writers, is random and manic. Writers are either flung onto centre stage or ignored completely. New talents are discovered (this being the main and perhaps only virtue of any award system) but many significant artists such as Robin Blaser or Roy Kiyooka or Al Pittman can go through their whole careers being barely mentioned in the national newspapers. The best critics of our time, who are less obsessed with the frantic picking of a season’s winner, are published quietly and almost invisibly. Critical works such as George Bowering’s Errata or The Mask In Place, Robert Kroetsch’s The Lovely Treachery Of Words, Dennis Lee’s Body Music, or Don McKay’s Vis à Vis prove there are writers who can calmly separate the wheat from the chaff, who can write about what is truly valuable in our literature.” — Michael Ondaatje, The Star

This is the publicly-accessible author conference at the WELL (the almost two-decades-old online discussion center originally founded by Stewart Brand and the other CoEvolution/Whole Earth Review geeks and now part of Salon), currently featuring a discussion with prolific and iconoclastic science fiction (and more) writer Charlie Stross, hosted by Cory Doctorow. Here’s a list of past guests over the course of inkwell.vue’s five years. I’m going off to dip into the Kelly Link and Jeff Tamarkin (Jefferson Airplane) discussions, for starters…

“The community draft boards that became notorious for sending reluctant young men off to Vietnam have languished sinced the early 1970s, their membership ebbing and their purpose all but lost when the draft was ended. But a few weeks ago, on an obscure federal Web site devoted to the war on terrorism, the Bush administration quietly began a public campaign to bring the draft boards back to life. Especially for those who were of age to fight in the Vietnam, it is an ominous flashback of a message. Even floating the idea of a draft in the months before an election would be politically explosive, and the Pentagon last week was adamant that the push to staff up the draft boards is not a portent of things to come. Increasingly, however, military experts and even some influential members of Congress are suggesting that if Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s prediction of a ‘long, hard slog’ in Iraq and Afghanistan proves accurate, the U.S. may have no choice but to consider a draft to fully staff the nation’s military in a time of global instability.” —Salon [via wood s lot]

The ‘quiet public campaign’ consists of floating an invitation to become a selective service local board member on defendamerica.com, from the Dept. of Defense. The last time there was a push for full occupancy of the more than 20,000 slots in the selective service machinery was during the Reagan administration more than 20 years ago. As one of those who was ‘of age to fight in Vietnam’ and who has a son who I will never send to be cannonfodder for neo-con criminal dreams of empire, this is a hotbutton issue for me. It is hard to believe the dysadministration is foolish enough to go on record about resurrecting the draft just when the enthusiasm of the American people for mounting military casualties is at its ebb, and that it can try to ‘spin’ its way out of the resultant criticism by telling us that black is white, this is not a portent of things to come, when it has been caught in recent months in so many portentious lies around its military campaign. Almost certainly, this is too big a liability to go further in public before the elections, but people interested in seeing Bush dumped next year should make sure the public knows how far it has gone already.

According to some experts, basic math might compel the Pentagon to reconsider the draft: Of a total U.S. military force of 1.4 million people around the globe (many of them in non-combat support positions and in services like the Air Force and Navy), there are currently about 140,000 active-duty, reserve and National Guard soldiers currently deployed in Iraq — and though Rumsfeld has been an advocate of a lean, nimble military apparatus, history suggests he needs more muscle.

“The closest parallel to the Iraq situation is the British in Northern Ireland, where you also had some people supporting the occupying army and some opposing them, and where the opponents were willing to resort to terror tactics,” says Charles Peña, director of defense studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “There the British needed a ratio of 10 soldiers per 1,000 population to restore order, and at their height, it was 20 soldiers per 1,000 population. If you transfer that to Iraq, it would mean you’d need at least 240,000 troops and maybe as many as 480,000.

“The only reason you aren’t hearing these kinds of numbers discussed by the White House and the Defense Department right now,” Peña adds, “is that you couldn’t come up with them without a return to the draft, and they don’t want to talk about that.

The Pentagon has already had to double the deployment periods of some units, call up more reserves and extend tours of duty by a year — all highly unpopular moves. Meanwhile, the recent spate of deadly bombings in Baghdad, Falluja and other cities, and increasing attacks on U.S. forces throughout Iraq have forced the U.S. to reconsider its plans to reduce troop deployments…

“The government is in a bit of a box,” Ned Lebow (a military manpower expert and professor of government at Dartmouth College) says. “They can hold reservists on active duty longer, and risk antagonizing that whole section of America that has family members who join the Reserves. They can try to pay soldiers more, but it’s not clear that works — and besides, there’s already an enormous budget deficit. They can try to bribe other countries to contribute more troops, which they’re trying to do now, but not with much success. Or they can try Iraqization of the war — though we saw what happened to Vietnamization, and Afghanization of the war in Afghanistan isn’t working, so Iraqization doesn’t seem likely to work either.

“So,” Lebow concludes, “that leaves the draft.” ”

Time to dust off the old arguments against the selective service system — such as the inequitable burden on the poor and Americans of color and the fact that along with the draft inevitably comes the remarkablly inequitable system of draft deferments (which is likely to persist even if they claim the loopholes are being closed; after all, look at the tax code, for example!). Time to resurrect the public scrutiny of the war records evasive tactics of dysadministration figures. And time to re-alert the public to that provision of the ‘Leave No Child Behind’ education act of last year that quietly mandated that school boards provide a database of all their enrolled students to the selective service (even before the draft is resurrected, which would require an act of Congress, young men [not women] of draft age are required to register with selective service) unless they opt out.

Parenthetically, after we invaded Iraq and I began to publicize the cases of members of the armed forces who wanted out of our misbegotten enterprise, I had a public exchange with Rebecca Blood about whether there could technically be conscientious objection in a draftless volunteer military. I was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam draft era; I felt that, yes, keeping to the literal text, one can have ‘objections’ as a matter of ‘conscience’ to serving in the military even in peacetime. Rumsfeld may be making this a moot point. It is time to reeducate the American people about the mechanism for this ‘faith-based initiative’. The crucial hoop through which one has to jump to be a CO is to persuade your local draft board — your Republican draft board — that you are opposed to all military action rather than just the particular flavor of the moment. It is not too soon to work to introduce an ethically-based peace education curriculum to our children’s schools (and to our homes) if it is not already there, to help them shape their conscientious thinking.

And what if peace-minded individuals responded to the call to volunteer for the selective service local boards, to make sure that the ‘draft machine’ works exactly as it should, i.e. not at all. Come wearing your wooden shoes…