Let's Talk About The Draft Without Using The D-Word

Want to see someone support "The Draft" without actually mentioning the D Word? Then check out Thomas Friedman's column in today's New York Times. Friedman begins by noting that Iraq is descending deeper into violence but that no-one in Washington is talking about it.

Conservatives don't want to talk about it because, with a few exceptions, they think their job is just to applaud whatever the Bush team does. Liberals don't want to talk about Iraq because, with a few exceptions, they thought the war was wrong and deep down don't want the Bush team to succeed. As a result, Iraq is drifting sideways and the whole burden is being carried by our military. The rest of the country has gone shopping, which seems to suit Karl Rove just fine.

Friedman thinks that the situation is still winnable but that action has to be taken soon, before Iraq reaches the tipping point the point "where the key communities begin to invest more energy in preparing their own militias for a scramble for power - when everything falls apart, rather than investing their energies in making the hard compromises within and between their communities to build a unified, democratizing Iraq."

He begins his "Let's Talk About Iraq" by rightly blaming Rumsfeld for what he calls the "just enough troops to lose" doctrine:

Our core problem in Iraq remains Donald Rumsfeld's disastrous decision - endorsed by President Bush - to invade Iraq on the cheap. From the day the looting started, it has been obvious that we did not have enough troops there. We have never fully controlled the terrain. Almost every problem we face in Iraq today - the rise of ethnic militias, the weakness of the economy, the shortages of gas and electricity, the kidnappings, the flight of middle-class professionals - flows from not having gone into Iraq with the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force.

And then stops. That's his solution. Enough troops. No mention of tactics changes, of infrastructure improvements, of ending corporate or government corruption, of reaching out with offers of negotiation to those insurgents who are truly only fighting for a national image rather than a holy war. Just more troops.

He discounts the Iraqi security forces entirely. "Training is overrated, in my book. Where you have motivated officers and soldiers, you have an army punching above its weight. Where you don't have motivated officers and soldiers, you have an army punching a clock." And , he says, the Iraqis do not have the kind of political charismatic figures who motivate.

I have to admit, I almost stopped reading right there. Anyone who doesn't know that training, definitely not political leaders, is what makes for motivated soldiers is so ignorant of basic military reality as to be essentially illiterate on the topic. But I had to find out if he would use the "D Word". Nope, he doesn't. He ends with this:

Calling for more troops now, I know, is the last thing anyone wants to hear. But we are fooling ourselves to think that a decent, normal, forward-looking Iraqi politics or army is going to emerge from a totally insecure environment, where you can feel safe only with your own tribe.

No mention of where those troops will come from, with Marines and Army about to go back for 3rd and 4th tours, unit strengths depleted by wounded soldiers, and a crisis in recruitment. No mention of the UK which is now in a position where a third of the army is "seriously impaired" in terms of combat readiness. No mention at all of where these troops will come from.

So he managed a whole column advocating the draft without mentioning The Draft. Remarkable.