When Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) said that 20,000 to 30,000 American deaths would be an acceptable price for toppling Saddam, you can bet your last dime that he wasn't including anyone in the Lugar family in that calculation.

Would the deaths of 30,000 Martin Vineyards make George Bush think twice about fighting in the dessert? Possibly. Would the deaths of 500 Harvard students make him reconsider? You bet. And if it didn't, the angry denunciations and public outcry of their parents and teachers and friends and next-door neighbors surely would.

Tragically, it seems pointless even to speculate. Harvard students, with the exception of some ROTC students, are not part of the dying class, and the Roberts family is. We members of the American elite have a great bargain going: we're content to let the unfortunates in our "all-volunteer" army do the dying, and policy makers will let us get away with it.

Do I sound overly cynical? Remember, the anti-war protests that the SWARME idolizes disappeared not when hostilities ceased in 1975, but when the draft ended in 1972. I have no doubts that at some level, Harvard peaceniks sincerely wanted peace and justice in Southeast Asia, just as SWARME members want peace in the Middle East. But as Fallows writes, "There was no mistaking which emotions came from the heart, which principles really seemed worth fighting for."

OF course, it would be a futile, almost meaningless gesture for any one of us to volunteer for combat out of principle. Those one or two pious students would fight and possibly die, and the system would continue more or less unchanged.

The only solution is universal conscription--no exemptions, no deferments. The draft got a bad rap because of its association with an unpopular war, but it remains the best insurance against unjust wars.

Far too often in our democracy, the decision-making elite is insulated from the consequences of its decisions. In order for a democratic government to govern responsibly, burdens and sacrifices must be equitably distributed among all citizens. This principle is affirmed by democracies as diverse as Norway, Israel, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Colombia, all of which have universal conscription. Let us fight if we must, but let us be certain that our goals are worth the sacrifice of thousands of sons--everybody's sons.

"Five years after Kent State," Fallows wrote, "it is clear how the war could have lasted so long. Johnson and Nixon both knew that the fighting could continue only so long as the vague, hypothetical benefits of holding off Asian communism outweighed the immmediate, palpable domestic pain. They knew that when the screaming grew too loud and too many sons had been killed, the game would be over. That is why...our reluctance to [be drafted] helped prolong the war."

We have forgotten the past, and I fear we are condemned to repeat it.