Wow. You know your war is going poorly when Henry Kissinger loses faith. But not everyone is ready to give up on Iraq. Several public officials are pushing for one last influx of troops to try stymieing the violence in Baghdad. But the numbers being thrown around -- 20,000 or so -- seem so pathetically small that the military analysts who dubbed it the "Go Big" option must still be giggling at their Pentagon desks. How tragic, then, that Iraq's answer to Jon Stewart, who will surely mock this plan, died in an apparent execution-style murder.
Is the answer a reinstatement of the draft? Charles Rangel, D-NY, seems to think so. Even though Democrats will leave the draft off the legislative agenda next year, pulling off the kind of massive reinforcements necessary to make a final push actually, you know, work would require more troops than we have available in our current all-volunteer force (AVF). Several studies have argued that the military is better off under AVF. That's plausible as far as it goes. But a temporary use of the draft to change the momentum of the conflict in Iraq would likely deliver geo-political dividends many times over, to say nothing of saving American and Iraqi lives in the long run. It also makes strategic sense, in that a draft frees up the military's specialized, professional resources from running routine patrols so that they may be redeployed to the areas where the insurgency is most active.
There's also a convincing liberal case for conscription, best made by Mickey Kaus, that sees the draft as key in engendering civic equality between Americans of different socio-economic backgrounds. He approvingly retells the story of PT109 -- John F. Kennedy's naval command in World War II -- whose crew ran the gambit from blue collar workers to Ivy League students. Today's military, he argues, bears no resemblance to that of the time when all strata of society felt called to sacrifice. If liberalism is concerned with equal human dignity, Kaus argues that the country needs common civic institutions that thread through class divisions. The military, under the draft, would be the backbone of this vision.
Of course, Kaus' idea is not politically feasible in the slightest. But since Americans are clearly so torn between keeping our troops in harm's way and conceding defeat in Iraq, I wonder how much slack they'd cut a public official bold enough to back the draft. Though I imagine a serious politician would have to place limits on the logistics (say, let it run for a maximum of three years), I'm not sure that it would be the career killer it's been before in the post-Vietnam era.
