Who's Doing the Stirring?
The NY Times blames “some Democrats and Internet bloggers” for “stirring up talk of a ‘secret plan’ by the Bush administration to resume the draft.” The stirring was prompted by a press report of a Selective Service plan to stage a mock draft “to determine how, if necessary, the government would get some 100,000 young adults to report to their local draft boards.” The exercise, the Service assures us, is unrelated to recent proposals to send a “surge” of new troops to Iraq. Heck, they schedule and cancel mock drafts all the time. Nothing to see here.
Speculation about a draft is actually stirred by surge proponents, who have yet to explain where they will find the surging troops without drafting them, by the secretary of veterans affairs, who recently opined that a draft might benefit the country, and by the president, who wants a bigger Army despite the military’s struggle to meet existing enlistment quotas. When the Selective Service director complains that “you have people trying to create fear when there’s nothing there” – referring, like the Times, to Democrats – he’s talking past the disconnect between Republican support for plans that require more troops and the absence of any meaningful plan to find them. If Republicans don’t want the country to worry about a draft, they should give us a realistic plan for increasing the size of the military without one.
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