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AMY GOODMAN: Noam Chomsky, speaking on Sunday in Princeton, New Jersey. Afterwards, he was asked a series of question, one of them was, would the draft be reinstated.
NOAM CHOMSKY: I think its extremely unlikely. I should tell you this as a word of personal background. I was very much involved in the resistance movement in the 1960s. In fact, I was just barely the only reason I missed a long jail sentence is because the Tet Offensive came along and the trials were called off. So I was very much involved in the resistance, but I was never against the draft. I disagreed with a lot of my friends and associates on that, for a very good reason, I think at least as nobody seems to agree. In my view, if theres going to be an army, I think it ought to be a citizens army. Now, here I do agree with some people, the top brass, they dont want a citizens army. They want a mercenary army, what we call a volunteer army. A mercenary army of the disadvantaged. And in fact, in the Vietnam war, the U.S. military realized, they had made a very bad mistake. I mean, for the first time I think ever in the history of European imperialism, including us,
they had used a citizens army to fight a vicious, brutal, colonial war, and civilians just cannot do that kind of a thing. For that, you need the French foreign legion, the Gurkhas or something like that. Every predecessor has used mercenaries, often drawn from the country that theyre attacking like England ran India with Indian mercenaries. You take them from one place and send them to kill people in the other place. Thats the standard way to run imperial wars. Theyre just too brutal and violent and murderous. Civilians are not going to be able to do it for very long. What happened was, the army started falling apart. One of the reasons that the army was withdrawn was because the top military wanted it out of there. They were afraid they were not going to have an army anymore. Soldiers were fragging officer. The whole thing was falling apart. They were on drugs. And thats why I think that theyre not going to have a draft. Thats why Im in favor of it. If theres going to be an army that will fight brutal, colonial wars, and thats the only likely kind of war, Im not talking about the militarization of space and that kind of thing, I mean ground wars, it ought to be a citizens army so that the attitudes of the society are reflected in the military.
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http://www.democracynow.org/2004/11/15/noam_chomsky_on_yasser_arafat_iraq
Sending in the National Guard to man a brutal occupation was a veritable prescription for mass PTSD.