Cite? I’m in Canada and have never heard of such a rule.
Please, not in public. 
Free clue: If I’m assembling a list of red automobiles, it’s not “cherry-picking” if I don’t put any blue automobiles on it.
Umm… in case you’ve been asleep since Reagan was in office … our volunteer armed forces are getting their asses kicked in Iraq by a very unhappy native population.
The problem with all of our lovely military planners is that all of their assumptions are based on the notion that we (a) invade a country (b) smash their traditional armed forces © do a victory dance. Which we can do to just about any nation on the planet. Unfortunately, they all seem to omit (d) where we, in every single case, end up turning into a permanent police force, send people to die for years for dubious reasons, and waste tens of billions of dollars on men, munitions, and equipment.
If our volunteer armed forces are asked to go into both Iran and Syria (as seems likely) while still riding the bucking bronco that is Iraq, we’re going to need more bodies, period. We’re burning out the people that are on the ground right now with endless deployments, and if we have to send them to an active front on either side of Iraq (or if North Korea started something real), we’ll need more bodies in Iraq to keep things in line. The majority of the troops we have doing patrolling there now are not properly trained for the sort of police work they’re doing now – they’re not MPs – so draftees, frankly, won’t be in much worse shape.
If you’re on the draft board, expect your next credit report to show unpaid $multi-k purchases from Thai kiddie-porn outfits (or the equivalent)…
Puh-leeze. This is eq
Puh-leeze. This is equivalent to defending Clinton by pointing out that 99% of his sworn statements were not perjurious, and accusing his attackers of “cherry-picking” by focusing their attention on the ones that were.
I’m going to point out that our forces could, in fact, pacify Iraq fairly easily. It’s simply a matter of not having the political will to do so. It would take reverting back to a war footing, and treating it as such. Many innocent people would die. But it could be done.
I’m not sure I’d have the guts to say “do it”, myself. I wouldn’t have started the war, either, but I just wanted to point out that we are being hampered by political leadership, and not by our troops.
Really? Thats a facinating statement. How exactly are you measuring the ‘fact’ that our forces are ‘getting their asses kicked in Iraq by a very unhappy native population’?? It certainly doesn’t appear that way to me, so I’d like you to expand on that a bit if you would. Especially its relevant to the OP as far as why the military wouldn’t want to touch a new draft with a 10 foot pole.
The US military has never had an occupation mind set. We’ve always seen ourselves as liberators or defenders. I agree that the expectations in Iraq about how we’d be received and the course of the war after the defeat of the Saddam’s government and military were way off the mark. We underestimated Saddam’s various paramilitary and military forces, thinking they would surrender after being defeated instead of going underground and fighting as guerilla’s. I can actually see this mistake happening…we figured they would be so demoralized after the crushing blow we gave them that they wouldn’t want to keep fighting.
We also underestimated how upset the Sunni’s would be by having their stranglehold over the majority of the Iraqi populace broken. This was probably less understandable of a mistake. The biggest mistake IMO was our underestimation of foreign jihadists venturing to Iraq to bag a few American’s. We should have known this was a likely outcome, having seen the exact same thing in Afghanistan when the Soviets invaded.
This assumes of course that we ARE going into Iran and/or Syria…or that we intend to invade and conquere either or both. Both are pretty flimsy assumptions. I can certainly see percision air strikes against one or both, cruise missiles or even limited covert operations using special forces. But I seriously doubt America will be doing any more invasion/occupation adventures in the forseeable future. Iraq is going to be quite enough on our plate for some time to come.
However, even if Bush et al really ARE stupid enough to stick our collective cranks into the hornets nest of Iran or Syria they don’t necessarily need to institute a draft…there are other means to increase the size of our military that would be just as fast as a draft.
-XT
Ah, yes, the old “if only we had the will” argument, which essentially reduces the hapless Third Worlders to be “pacified” to the status of unruly children. It was bullshit in Vietnam and it’s bullshit in Iraq.
The harder you hit 'em the angrier you’ll make 'em.
I disagree, especially with reguards to Iraq. I think it IS a matter of national will…the will to remain instead of leave. Vietnam, to a lesser degree, was also a matter of will…however, no one can seriously expect a democracy to keep its ‘will’ for over a decade with no appearent end in sight. I actually do think that had the US stayed there would still be a South Vietnam today, but I’m unsure whether preventing a unified Vietnam, even a unified COMMUNIST Vietnam, was worth the cost to the US…in fact, I DON’T think it was. Perhaps Iraq will be the same thing. Right now I’m still in ‘we broke it, be bought into fixing it’ mode. Give it a decade though and I’ll probably be in the streets myself with a sign. I just hope all that ‘free love’ stuff makes a comeback as well…
-XT
Maybe you are correct. But could we do so and still accomplish our war aims? What exactly did we go to war for? We wanted to kick out Saddam and establish some sort of popular government that could be called democratic if you squinted right. And keep the oil flowing. And to show other middle eastern countries that they could be next.
What would be accomplish by occupying Iraq this way? I guess we could fortify the oil fields and keep the oil flowing. But we certainly couldn’t establish a “friendly” government.
In some ways you are right though. We have all the military force we need to kill the various Jihadis, Baathists, Sunni nationalists, and Shiite militia that are causing the trouble. We have more than enough military force to kill every human being in Iraq. What we don’t have is the intelligence to identify who the bad guys are, kill them, and leave everyone else alone.
Right. I’m assuming by “political will” you mean “near-complete genocide.” Sure. We could do that. 25 million dead Iraqis are very peaceful.
Yeah. Near-complete genocide’d do it. Luckily, we don’t have the political will to do that. Would I put it past the people in office now? I’d like to say that they wouldn’t, but I’m not quite sure. The point remains, we’re having these issues because we’re not fighting a total war. We’re trying to be humane about it. This is a good thing, but it causes issues. I’m glad that we feel we can be humane, but my studies of history tend to show that wars that leave large masses of upset people around, still armed, tend to have flashbacks later. Delenda Carthago Est, and all that. I’m not advocating it, certainly, it’s unacceptable. But we could do it if we wanted.
Basically, I feel this war violated the Powell Doctrine from the first few weeks, where we started to run out of supplies early, and was compounded by an early declaration of victory. This has caused a cascading series of issues, leading directly to the continued need for soldiers in what has become an extended police action. As in ‘policing the area’. Cleaning up the country. Which is, when you get down to it, really nasty, if slow, stuff. It requires more troops than we have. There are two places to get them. America and Iraq. We’re trying to train up Iraqi troops, but with mixed results. The result of the future of that program will determine if A: we need a draft, and B: if we declare certain areas in rebellion and blow the heck out of them for long periods of time, killing many innocents. The fewer troops we have, the more casualties we have, the harsher we have to act in order to succeed, as things stand now.
Anyone disagree with this analysis?
Yeah, Rick, you’re right. There’s a fine line there, and I’m not quite sure where it is. But a war has a draining effect on a national character. It’s the difference between post WWI Germany and post WWII Germany. If you batter them enough, they will lose. The problem is how to batter them. Remember, every real battle the Cong ran into, they lost. The hard part is getting them to fight in a battle. If we’d stuck it out after Tet, maybe we could have won. If we’d had permission to bomb North, maybe we would have won. But I don’t want to refight that war, I just want to point out the mistakes we made then, and how they apply to the current situation.
And, compared to our economic and military status, they are children, as countries. The thing is, we’re the fifteen year old with the baseball bat. I never said we were any better. We should be, but we’re not. By children, I don’t mean that any citizen is stupider, less brave, uglier, shorter, less educated, or god-have-you what. Simply that we have a bigger economic machine, superior supply lines, and a qualitative superiority in weapons and combined arms tactics.
It doesn’t make us any more mature. Can you agree with that?
False dilemna. Sure, if the war goes on we might need to either increase our troop levels via a draft or increase the ferocity of our attacks if we want to achieve our stated goals.
If we decide Iraq is unwinnable without either a draft or near-genocide, the obvious solution is to stop trying to win Iraq. Here’s the thing. Even if the Bush administration and the Republicans think that reinstituting would be the right thing to do, they still won’t do it, because it still wouldn’t work. Don’t the Republicans have to stay in power to keep shoveling taxpayer money into the bank accounts of their corporate masters? Iraq may have oil, but if the Republicans are voted out of office, how can Haliburton et al exploit that oil?
The war in Iraq isn’t an end, it is a means to an end. We can all have different opinions about what that end really is, and whether that end is achievable given US political realities, but there is an end. Sacrificing everything so that the war can go on doesn’t make sense, especially since once you’ve sacrificed everything you won’t be in charge anymore and so won’t be able to make the war continue anyway.
So if winning the war in Iraq requires a draft, the reality is that the war is lost. But the war in Iraq is just one battle in a larger war.
Good point. Or C: If we do the evacuation boogie. But, you know, I don’t think things are that bad. There’s no major external supplier like Russia or China to deal with, and as we get more local troops in, they’ll be able to deal with local situations, better.
Also, the civilians aren’t too thrilled with the bombers, I recall one getting stomped last week when they found he was wiring their cars to explode. I’m sure they’re not too thrilled with us, either, but the point remains, we’ve got a whole bunch of factions here, and there’s going to be a lot of infighting. It’s not going to be a unified front.
As far as what I meant by choice B: I meant a Fallujah style operation, where we select a location, isolate it, and ‘pacify’ the hell out of it. I see that as a likely event at least two more times in the short future.
But the point I’m making, really, is that this need for more troops isn’t inherent in the situation in Iraq. It’s inherent in the responses we’re making to the situation in Iraq. There are other, less drastic ways to reduce need for troops, but they do go against the choices of the powers-that-be. I simply chose the simplest and easiest to explain as a clearly understandable example. I certainly don’t advocate it.
A second and third set of examples would be luring the opponents (It’s not a unified resistance, they’re not all fanatics, they just oppose us) into an organized structure and a set-piece battle of some kind. It’s possible, and I can see three or four ways to do it. Crack down harder on two, let one off easy, people will flock to the successful one, it grows relative to the others, and then decapitate it.
Set piece battle? Slip somehow that the guards on a tank park of Saddam’s will be lighter than usual for some reason. The opponents would need force to take it, but they could have tanks if they won. Have the guards return early and, well, fight them.
Sure, it’s simplified. Sure, it’s not the best decision. But you see my point about the draft being only one of several options, related mostly to how we choose to fight, and not any inherent need? And how, as time goes on, and we do train more Iraqi forces, the need for the draft will lessen? This is probably the worst part for the Army. The armed forces are great at fighting things. They’re not so good as garrison soldiers, because you want a lot of low tech soldiers for that, not highly skilled specialists. And yes, I consider a US Army Infantry Private a highly skilled specialist.