Kerry has been saying that Bush will reinstate the Draft. That's a damn lie.
The short and sweet answer:
We have 140,000 soldiers in Iraq.
Hypothetically, say we want to bring that up to 200,000. That's 60,000 more people.
We have 1.4 million soldiers on active duty. Why would we need to draft anyone?
The long answer:
What we need in Iraq is not soldiers, we need policemen. Most of our soldiers are trained to be soldiers against the Soviet Union (which doesn't exist anymore). Its even worse for NATO soldiers because the Europeans have been much slower to adapt to the end of the Cold War then we have (and we adapted too slowly as it was). So the reality is that while it might be nice to have more soldiers, of a certain type, those people don't exist. A draft wouldn't help that.
We need policemen who speak Arabic, and who understand the Iraqi culture. It turns out there's a whole country full of people willing to be policemen in Iraq. It's called...Iraq! President Bush's plan isn't to send more soldiers to Iraq, President Bush's plan is to train more Iraqis to be policemen.
This has some advantages beyond the obvious ones of language and culture. If an American soldier loses his temper and hits an Iraqi with a nightstick, its a war crime that reflects badly on America. If an Iraqi does it, its a personal crime that reflects badly on that policeman.
Bringing back the draft is just a damn lie by a damn fool.
Comments (1)
And it’s a lie that’s picking up steam via repetition at such bastions of “free thought” as dkos. I guess they’re trying the “repeat it until people believe it” strategy, despite the obvious fact that both bills that have attempted to reintroduce the draft were written by Democrats, and despite the fact that Rumsfeld is firmly against a draftee military.
Posted by mns | September 30, 2004 8:45 AM
Posted on September 30, 2004 08:45