Maybe we wouldn't need a draft if the war were being fought under your terms, but it ain't being fought that way.
Right now the grunts are worn out and used up. It's a disgrace that 25 year old guys are being killed on their third tour, while there are able bodied keyboard warriors back home.
Rumsfeld obviously convinced the President a small Army and Marine Corps is all we needed. He's gone and the President deserved better counsel in that regard, but it was his call anyway. It is too late now to mobilize popular support for a greatly expanded military, but it wasn't five years ago.
The country, congress and the President have painted us all into a corner. Twenty one thousand five hundred now is like spitting in the ocean. There is no doubt in my mind that if the President had more troops for Iraq, he'd use them. Without completely breaking the Army and MC, he doesn't have them.
Which means that, to win, we need to find other manpower.
And that means Iraqis, of our choosing.
Kurds are easy, and Kurdistan is not a problem. It's stable and able to defend itself.
The South is a mess, but we can have a great big, bad, violent and abusive Iraqi army there if we want one. We just need to get out of the way and let it go after the Sunnis, who are still the ones planting the IEDs blowing up OUR guys.
It means ethnic cleansing and a lot of dead people.
But at the end of it, it means that bad guys beholden to US will rule the roost in the South, as opposed to bad guys in the Sunni jihad, or bad guys aligned with Teheran.
Of course doing it this way means signing the death warrant for tens, or hundreds, of thousands of innocents. But that's what going to war in Iraq ALWAYS meant. We were only fooling ourselves that it didn't.
In the aftermath, a sprawling, corrupt, Arabist Shi'ite state with a war recivil war record as bloody as Saddam's, will be in power in the South, and at war with Syria and Iran, and a Kurdish entity will be in power in the North. Both will be beholden to us.
That is a victory.
It requires us to fully embrace the evil of a regime that, to win, will commit ethnic cleansing of Sunnis in the South. These Sunnis are our enemies, and the enemies of everything we stand for in the Middle East. We keep foolishly pretending that they don't have to be.
They are, and they DO have to be, and we're going to retreat in defeat and hand the place over to the pro-Iranian Shi'a (who will ALSO carry out the ethnic cleansing, but without our arms and money). Which will be a disaster.
We can win.
Our grandchildren will wring their hands about how evil we were, about how we "became as bad as our enemies", etc. And they will be right.
But we will have WON, and that's what I care about HERE and NOW. The echoes of that evil are for future generations to sob over. Right now, I want victory.
We were once willing to inflict this sort of desolation on other AMERICANS (voir: Sherman's March), but our leadership are now such a bunch of pansies that they will not do what has to be done to WIN.
Or we can do anything else, anything at all, and lose.
Bush won't embrace the evil option. He has been recommended it more than once, and he has publicly said "No". So instead the MORE evil option will be the outcome: which is that really bad guys still win, still butcher their foes AND they're our enemies too.
We can't do it with our army. We can still do it using Iraqis. Bush says no. Unless he changes his mind, we're dead.