Sen. Harkin LETTER: Bush has no choice but to reinstate draft

[AntiFascist]

http://www.iowastatedaily.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/10/26/417dc4f39c1c8

President Bush may or may not have a secret plan to reinstate the draft. But this is beside the point. The deteriorating facts on the ground in Iraq, plus the Bush doctrine of acting pre-emptively and unilaterally against hostile regimes, will soon leave him no choice. If President Bush is re-elected, he will have to restart the draft.

Indeed, President Bush has already imposed Stage 1 of a new draft. Many soldiers whose enlistment period is up are not being allowed to leave the service, and those who left the service years ago are being forced to put on the uniform again against their will. It is clear that we already have a backdoor draft.

President Bush has effectively ended the all-volunteer military.

<snip>

It is probably too much to expect President Bush to acknowledge this before Election Day. But we would do well to remember when President Lyndon Johnson was running for election in 1964. Voters were afraid that he had a secret plan to escalate the war in Vietnam.

He denied it, repeatedly promising, "I will not send American boys half way around the world to do a job that Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves."

Johnson was re-elected. And sure enough, millions of American boys were drafted and sent halfway around the world to Vietnam. More than 17,000 of those draftees got killed in combat.

Today we have good reasons to fear the return of the draft. George W. Bush may have avoided the draft when he was a young man. But if reelected, he will not be able to avoid the draft as President.

Sen. Tom Harkin

[ixion]

1. "We will not have an all volunteer army"

Said the Chimp during a stump speech last week.

He corrected himself, but the Freudian slip had already passed. ;-)

[bobbieinok]

2. in IAState Daily......... anywhere else??? in IA????MN, WI, MI, OH ??????

rest of country??????

[AntiFascist]

3. Targeting college students in key battleground states....

seems to be a highly effective strategy!

[teryang]

4. Do the math, talk of modest 20,000 increase in Iraq

equals the need for 60,000 new recruits at home above and beyond current retention and recruitment goals. Where will they come from? Arguably, (and I would argue it) this number (60,000) is totally inadequate to meet the commitments they have undertaken. The active duty Army needs to be increased much more because increased Iraq commitments do not allow American ground forces to respond to any contingency elsewhere. This is just another reason Colin Powell's trip to Asia is a joke.