In a rather alarming article in last week’s issue of The New Yorker, Steve Coll reports on an appearance by General Richard Cody, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before the Senate Armed Service Committee. “The current demand for our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeds the sustainable supply, and limits our ability to provide ready forces for other contingencies. . . .Overall, our readiness is being consumed as fast as we build it. If unaddressed, this lack of balance poses a significant risk to the all-volunteer force, and degrades the Army’s ability to make a timely response to other contingencies.’’
This is scary. Basically Cody is saying that we don’t have the forces to respond to other crises posed by Iran or North Korea or Canada, for that matter. And when he says these conditions threaten the all-volunteer force, well, you know what he means, don’t you?
The resumption of the draft.
As it turned out, Cody testified about a week before Gen. David Petraeus appeared to talk about how things are going in Iraq. Petraeus, you’ll recall, described the country as a slow student–okay in some places, needs work in others. He was non-committal about when troops would start to leave. But here’s what you have to keep in mind.
It doesn’t matter how long he thinks they need to stay, or how long Bush thinks they need to stay, or how long Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or John McCain thinks they need to stay. If you believe Cody, there’s just not enough soldiers to maintain current levels for long.
Unless there’s a draft.
Which may turn out to be the way we end this war that no one wants and that the government won’t end. This idea was very well expressed by the actor Tommie Lee Jones this month in an interview in the magazine O2138. “We had the draft in ’68, we had a bullshit war, and it ultimately ended,’’ said Lee. “And there were terrific repercussions throughout the government. The Bush administration has escaped those repercussions because the American people have a way to turn their head and say, `It doesn’t really affect my family. My daughter is in no threat of having her legs blown off. My son is in no threat of coming back with no face, no ears, no nose—because he didn’t volunteer.’ If somebody were making them incur those risks, the votership might change radically.’’
So as you listen to the candidates this year, keep this in mind: we can end the war, or we can continue the war, resume the draft, have a lot of our kids killed and maimed, and then end the war.
Our choice.