There is a difference between the conscientious objector and a draft-dodger. The c-o is opposed to serving in a war because of his opposition to that war, with its possible requirement of him to kill; and there is a very noble tradition of that in the west.
But a draft-dodger is a different kettle of custard. The draft-dodger doesn't want to go to a war, not because he particularly objects to killing people in battle, but because he doesn't want to risk dying. That's fair enough. I know the feeling. Fear of violent death is a perfectly human response to danger.
So both d-d and c-o are opposed to going to war; both would rather risk imprisonment or exile rather than fight. You might prefer one species of war-objector to another, but no matter. Their loathing of war is what they have in common. They have one further feature in common. They have declined to serve their country's armed forces when those forces needed them most of all. They cannot then aspire to be the commander-in-chief of those armed forces; yet this very remarkable contradiction is precisely what Bill Clinton has achieved.
Moral posturing
If ever there were a classic draft-dodger's war, Kosovo provides it. This is not the war of the conscientious objector, for there would of course be no such war. This is the war of the man who would not lay his life on the line for his country in time of war, yet still wanted to be that country's president. Clinton's mutually irreconcilable ambitions have been reconciled, and the result has been a war which combines infantile moral posturing with an equally infantile lack of preparation, as if merely the nursery desire for something were enough to secure it.
The war is not wrong in principle. Wars, from one side or another, seldom are. NATO had both the moral authority and the legal power to engage in hostilities with the Yugoslav government. The morality of this war, as of any other, must depend largely on how it is waged. And it has been waged in true draft-dodging fashion, virtually eliminating risks to the pilots, (never mind the ground troops: there are none) thereby minimising the political risks to the Dodger-in-Chief himself, but enormously increasing the dangers to unfortunate civilians down below.
Those who freely enter the profession of arms have always done so knowing that there is the possibility that they might die prematurely or be gravely injured in the line of duty. In most cultures, wearing the uniform of your country's armed forces brings high social esteem. The esteem is not sartorial. It is based on the knowledge that the man in the uniform is a soldier who is prepared to fight and, if need be, die in his country's service.
That concept has been replaced within the Draft-Dodger's dispensation by a definition of soldiering which involves fighting and killing in the service of one's country, but not dying.
Imagine the uproar
The most cosseted life-forms in the USA today wear the uniforms of the US armed services. Since the war began, over 14,000 people have been killed in road, domestic and industrial accidents in the USA. Another 2,000 or so have been murdered. Imagine the uproar, with Dan Rather's tear-bedewed wattles wobbling with emotion, if merely one hundredth of even the murdered, never mind the accidental deaths, of servicemen and women had been killed in action over the same period.
A Draft-Dodger's war has the Draft-Dodger's moral principles emanating from the top. It means assuring the folks back home (and also your abominable but much-heartened enemy abroad) that you are militarily either so frivolous or pusillanimous that you will not use or endanger ground-troops. It means organisational inertia because those in the chain of command despise the Dodger-in-Chief.
(He doesn't care, so why should they?) It means starting a war with too few aircraft. It means embarking on ground attack without ground attack helicopters in the region. It means that when those helicopters arrive, their crews are still not trained. It means that missiles and bombs are launched from the safety of two miles' height, so that appalling loss of life occurs amongst the very people you are trying to help.
Morality of war
The Catholic Church is sound on the morality of war. Aside from just cause and proportionality of response to initial provocation, there is one central and over-riding question for those who contemplate war: Have I reasonable chance of winning? Am I embarking on a suspension of the sixth commandment with a strong chance of victory? If defeat or stalemate be the likely outcome, no matter the justice of the cause, the war is fundamentally immoral. Futile military gestures, such as the taking of life in doomed causes, are in themselves evil things.
We are, to be sure, living in a very strange world indeed in which those who have volunteered to be exposed to the dangers of soldiering are then specifically denied those perils. Logically, within this inverted order of things, pianists become bricklayers and neurosurgeons hew coal. Apprentice tyrants everywhere take note from the Draft-Dodger's War; you are unlikely to be so careful of the lives of your conscripts as our querulous western democracies have become towards the wellbeing of their professional soldiers. Odd days indeed. Draft-Dodger Days.