Day By Day© by Chris Muir.

November 20, 2006

Charlie Rangel's Draft Replay

UPDATE: Nancy Pelosi says no.

From the Washington Times:

The incoming Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means panel says he will introduce a bill to reinstitute a military draft in order to provide the U.S. with more troops, while Sen. John McCain continued his call for increase of troop levels in Iraq.

Rep. Charles B. Rangel of New York first called for a draft in January 2003, when Democrats were the minority party in both houses of Congress. Now that his party controls Capitol Hill, he was asked yesterday on CBS' "Face the Nation" if he was still serious about the proposal.

"You bet your life. Underscore 'serious,' " he said.

"I don't see how anyone can support the [Iraq] war and not support the draft," said Mr. Rangel, alluding to Mr. McCain's call for increased troop levels in Iraq and to the need to combat threats elsewhere in the world. "If we're going to challenge Iran and challenge North Korea and then, as some people have asked, to send more troops to Iraq, we can't do that without a draft."

Of course it's possible to support the war and not support a draft. A draft should be a last-ditch effort, and to my knowledge, we haven't reached that point.

Gone are the days when you could push a guy through six weeks of basic training, shove a gun in his hands and say, "Fight!" The Pentagon opposes a draft for that very reason. Today's complicated weapons systems need soldiers who are specially trained to use them. In other words, it's not your grandfather's Army anymore. The only way it would work would be to require draftees to stay in the military longer than a couple of years, and in that case, Canada's population will see a sudden upsurge in its population.

What's hypocritical is to say you support the troops but don't happen to support what they're doing right now, which is fighting in Iraq. It's also hypocritical to have voted for the war and then say it was a mistake, which is what many Democrats have done. (Rangel, at least, is not hypocritial in this instance.)

In my opinion, this whole thing is meant to make our presence in the Middle East even more divisive than it is now. It's got nothing to do with sharing the sacrifice, and everything to do with giving aging hippies and their protégés more ammunition for something to which they are already opposed.

Michelle Malkin weighs in.