Dowd scores again. Op-Ed Columnist: No Stars, Just Cuffs shows that the Bushies have no class and no decency.
While I don't oppose a draft in all circumstances, I do not want my sons drafted if they are going to be sent to fight Bush's wars of choice rather than fights of real necessity. And there are credible rumors that Syria or Iran are next.
This is pathetic: The only people talking about a draft are people OPPOSED to the war. And it’s being proposed only to whip up opposition among people who can’t be made to agonize over the deaths of people who voluteered to join the military. Like that woman’s son…
There are any number of honest arguments against the war. But if you’re going to start talking about a draft, I can only conclude you don’t think THOSE arguments are very persuasive.
I don’t think the National Guard or even the Marines volunteered to be sent abroad to fight and die when it wasn’t necessary to our security. Sure, that wasn’t in the induction papers, but it was part of the social contract. WW2 of course. Wars of choice, no.
And any idiot can see that with the current deployment level, not to mention the total injury rate in Iraq (combat and so-called non-combat), our forces are overstretched. The various desperate expedients being used to keep up troop levels, including extending committments past end-of-service dates (those are no longer volunteers), and telling soldiers they must reinlist now or be transferred to units in Iraq subjet to stop-loss (more non-volunteers) underlines the point that even without any more wars we have a problem. But even the old doctrine called for the ability to fight “two and a half” wars; now it seems we can barely fight this one–and the Bush administration is dropping strong hints about more preemptive actions in the mid-east.
Thus, a draft is a logical possibility perhaps even a tactical necessity. The Selective Service system was reinvigorated earlier in the Bush administration. The ducks are lined up in a row. And both the right-militarists and the left-anti-militarists support the draft: the first because they want a strong army but don’t want to pay market rates for it in salaries and pensions to the families who are our warrior (above-market payments to contractors is OK, that increases share prices and dividends), the second because they want the burden of fighting to fall on the children of the upper and middle classes in the hopes that their parents may become more cautious in their use of force.
The draft may not happen, I suppose, but it is certainly a legitimate issue for debate as it does seem a very real possibility.
If a draft starts to be perceived as a real possibility, the American public might react by having a greater appetite for massive strategic bombing as an alternative. The thinking being, why send boys into Fallujah when we can simply level the city and be done with it?
If it becomes necessary to go after Syria (probably because that’s where more than a few of Sadaam’s WMD’s are hiding), the case for old-school B52 carpet bombing of trouble spots becomes that much greater.
But I am not so pessimestic. I think we have sewn the seeds of democratic revolution to a much greater extent than our mainstream media would have us believe. Students in Iran are getting very little press coverage, but are emerging as a real power in that country, to name just one example. Syria and Jordan have similar movements underway. So before we start fretting over possibilities of a draft, we should take a good hard look at how the native young men and women are working to change their own countries.