
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 13, 1991                   TAG: 9103130088
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

NATIONAL-SERVICE BACKERS USE GULF WAR TO PUSH CAUSE

Supporters of national service - the idea that citizens ought to be encouraged to give a year or two out of their lives to their country - are trying to seize the opportunity accorded their cause by the ongoing celebrations of the service just rendered by U.S. troops in the Persian Gulf.

"What you've got here is a collective action that worked well and tweaked the feelings of guilt of everyone who was not sacrificing," said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank that has made national service one of its major causes.

But the outcome of the conflict with Iraq also presented supporters of various national service schemes with a large problem: The very successes of the war - how fast it went, how low the casualties were, how skilled the troops proved to be - may have been the best argument ever for the volunteer military. Why, ask opponents of national service, alter what works?

"The volunteer military has given us the best qualified, the best motivated and the best educated force ever - and that enabled it to handle the sophisticated equipment and to perform so superlatively," said Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Although Bandow opposed the gulf war, he argued that the conflict "proved you can get young people to come forward and defend their country if they think the interests at stake are worth defending."

Charles Moskos, a sociologist at Northwestern University whose book, "A Call To Civic Service," has become a manifesto for the national service movement, said that the war's brevity and low casualties short-circuited a burgeoning national debate over whether the obligation to defend the country was being borne fairly - and whether it was being borne disproportionately by blacks.

But Moskos thinks the public discussion of the military's role in giving lower-income Americans a chance at advancement may play back into the national service debate as the military shrinks from 2.1 million people to a projected 1.6 million by 1996.

"The fact that there won't be options for working-class youth to bootstrap themselves up through service will create a demand for more options," he said.

At its heart, the argument for national service is about the old American civic ideal that citizenship carries not only rights but obligations.

William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative columnist who has become an unexpected ally of the national service movement, summarized the impulse behind service in the one-word title of his recent book on the subject: "Gratitude."

But at another level, the quest for national service is a particular obsession of Democrats who think that middle-class voters are wary of welfare programs but are prepared to back programs like the old G.I. Bill, which provided generous benefits to those who were widely thought to have earned them through service in World War II. The advantage of such programs, says Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., is that they restore "the crucial link between civic duty and public reward." They also did a lot to promote upward mobility.

The national service approach being pushed by Nunn, Rep. Dave McCurdy, D-Okla., and Marshall's Progressive Policy Institute would replace existing student aid programs with a system through which volunteers in the military or in a domestic Citizens Corps would receive vouchers that could be used for college, job training or to make a down payment on a home.

But that approach has run into fierce objections from liberals who argue that the Nunn-McCurdy approach would in effect require national service only of lower-income students who needed the federal money.

Some national service advocates have proposed turning the Nunn-McCurdy proposal on its head. After college, students would be allowed to pay back government benefits not with money but with time served in pursuits like teaching or police work.

by CNB