The d-word
Here’s a reason to be glad that I’m well past the age of 26:
It should come as no surprise then, even as the president and his advisers continue to claim that everything is going well and according to plan, that saner heads at the Pentagon are taking steps to prepare for return to the draft.
As I reported on Monday in Salon magazine, using a Defense Department news website called DefendAmerica that provides Pentagon reports about the so-called “War on Terrorism” to “military communities,” the government put out a call for volunteers to help fill the hundreds of vacancies in over 2000 local draft boards and draft appeals boards. Current draft board members also report that last summer, they were urged to go out and recommend people to fill those vacancies, which currently run at about 16 percent nationwide.
The goal, according to a Selective Service spokesman, is to have the draft machinery ready to go “at the click of a finger.”
Yes folks, as the quagmire in Iraq gets deeper and deeper, and it becomes apparently that even calling up more Reserve and National Guard troops might not be enough, the U.S. government is quietly making itself ready to reinstitute the draft.
Of course, they deny it, as the last thing Bush wants to do before next year’s election is have Americans think their father, sons, and brothers are going to be marched off to die in Iraq. The signs are there though, and it’s not all that hard to believe that four more years of a Bush-style “war on terror” could lead to a need for more troops than a volunteer army can provide.
