We're Dodging the Draft Issue

[RedEarth]

We're Dodging the Draft Issue
If we need to occupy another country that threatens us, we will either do it with the help of our allies or the conscription of our kids

By Jonathan Alter
Newsweek


Oct. 4 issue - It's a potentially lethal issue—the kind that could make young voters swarm to the polls and their nervous parents change their minds about supporting President Bush. Republicans are peeved over Democratic claims that the president will impose a draft if he's re-elected. John Kerry was hammered for mildly suggesting that such an idea was even "possible." Bush backers are right that this is a suburban myth and no such plans are underway. A scary and misleading Democratic e-mail circulating on college campuses highlights pending legislation to revive the draft and efforts by the administration to bolster local Selective Service boards. Predictably, the e-mail doesn't mention that the draft bills, which are going nowhere, are sponsored mostly by Democrats (who think military service falls too heavily on minorities) and that the draft-board system is being kept well oiled because of old laws requiring it—not some nefarious Bush plot. "Not. Gonna. Happen," concludes conservative columnist Michelle Malkin.

Malkin is probably right. Even in the months after September 11, when Bush could have easily called upon young Americans to serve their country in both military and nonmilitary roles, he asked for no sacrifice. He knows that a draft would vaporize any remaining support for his Iraq policy. This would be of concern to him even as a second-term, lame-duck president. One thing we've learned about Bush is that he has never taken a position that he knew beforehand would be politically unpopular, including invading Iraq.

But the world is a strange and unpredictable place. While Bush has no plans to reinstate a draft, he could be forced into it by events. Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, a likely presidential candidate in 2008, says that a draft "might become necessary" in the years ahead. The threshold question before the election is this: which candidate is more likely to have so few international friends amid a crisis that he would have to move beyond the all-volunteer force? This question takes the seemingly arcane issue of burden-sharing and brings it home to the American heartland. If we need, God forbid, to occupy another country that truly threatens the United States, we will either do it with the help of our allies or with the conscription of our kids.

Every military expert agrees that the Army is already badly overstretched (the Air Force and Navy are fine). The National Guard and Reserves are in trouble. Guard recruitment is down 12 percent, and Reservists as old as their late 40s are being mobilized. Some heavy-duty arm-twisting is underway. According to the Rocky Mountain News, soldiers at Fort Carson, Colo., for instance, have been told that if they don't re-up to 2007 they will be shipped out pronto for Iraq.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6099727/site/newsweek/

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