No Draft for Darfur

Not that I think there will be a military draft anytime in the foreseeable future, but some military planners might be secretly wishing there were one. Or maybe it's political planners who would be engaging in the wishful thinking when there aren't enough bodies in the military to carry out their political objectives.

Helen Thomas writes that military recruitment is now being met with "disinterest." She notes that the Army and the Marines may have trouble making their annual recruiting goals and that the National Guard will surely miss its goal. Minority youth and women are increasingly reluctant to join up.

Thomas attributes this to the shift in purpose for the war in Iraq. There was more willingness to join up and serve when there was a perception of threat to the U.S., less willingness when the purpose is to "liberate" Iraq.

Reminding us of the saying from the Vietnam days ("Someday they'll give a war and nobody will come"), she also points out that a draft is unlikely and finds the quotes to shore up the point. Her conclusion is nicely done:

Compulsory military service is politically unpalatable -- and more so in an unpopular war. Although the administration has done a masterful job of shielding the public from photos of the coffins of the dead flown into the Dover, Del., military mortuary, the reality of war is getting through.

If the Army continues to be all-volunteer and enlistments keep falling, the good side of the equation is that it could force Bush and his saber-rattling strategists to slow down before launching another pre-emptive foreign adventure.

Bush may then try something new -- like peacemaking.

It almost seems like old news to be thinking about Iraq these days. The new news is Terri Schiavo and steroids and the really, really serious, almost-any-day-now-imminent collapse of Social Security. But there is other more or less new news lurking about--like Darfur. I can't help feeling that the Sudan would be a better place for American troops right now--if we had enough. But we don't, of course, because we're wasting them in a war that has no clear purpose, that was planned on false intelligence, that didn't include a plan for peace, and . . . well, it's all been said, hasn't it?

The thing is, we knew about Idi Amin and the horrors that he perpetrated--and we sat still. We knew about Bokassa--and let that get worse and worse. We knew about Rwanda--and just wrung our hands in sorrow. So now it's Darfur.

There may be some intellectual inconsistency here. I'll have to think about my unhappiness with military intervention in Iraq versus my thinking that we need to do something about Darfur. In the meantime, I'll also ponder the notion that the Sudan also has oil--but the major oil concession in the Darfur region belongs to China--which holds a fair amount of our national debt. Yet another reason, I suppose, to stay away from that draft thing.