Orcinus has a funny for Saturday.

Through Matt Yglesias I found Arkhangel's plan for winning in Iraq. It includes, of course, boots on the ground:

This almost goes without saying, but it needs to be said. We cannot accomplish our myriad missions with the numbers we currently have. Currently, we're tasked with two big missions: quelling the insurgency and securing the borders. We can do either, but not both--and while we've struggled heroically to accomplish both of these tasks, increasingly, the struggle is becoming more and more taxing.

Note that he's not even talking about Afghanistan here. So what to do? The draft. Draft draft draft.

Here's the politically unpalatable part: the President's going to have to either mobilize the remainder of the Guard & Reserve force, or implement the draft. ... At some point, we have to seriously consider restarting the draft, if only because we're in dire need of bodies, and I'm not certain that, given the situation in Iraq, enough people will volunteer to join the military. If Iraq is truly the epic struggle that it is, then we need to treat it as such. We cannot wage this war with half-measures, as we've been doing. Either we bring the full power and might of our war machine to bear against this enemy, or we might as well quit needlessly tossing lives away in a half-hearted struggle in support of a vague, half-baked notion.

This meme is rising; Juan Cole said essentially the same thing on the BBC last night. I can agree with all of this tactically; it's obvious that we need more boots on the ground in all of these places if we expect to "win." What these tacticians are ignoring is the political reality of the draft: if the draft is reinstated in the United States, the Iraq war is over. You think public scrutiny of the war is intense now? Wait until everyone's sons and daughters are threatened with Iraqi AK fire. You think opposition to Bush among the young is fierce now? Wait until they are personally threatened by this adminstration's ideological bungling.

Talking about a draft is therefore foolish. It's just not gonna happen. It'd be the end of the Republican party's grip on power for a generation.

(Should the left be pushing for the draft, then?)

...Hagel comes out for the draft three days later.

In a time of dark need comes Monster with the following magical photogasmic comparison:

Compare Ariel Sharon:





to Grimace:

From esteemed civil rights advocate Robert Novak:

But Afghanistan also needs more troops. So where will they come from? Nobody knows, and that connotes an overcommitment by the United States and a miscalculation at the Defense Department. The uniformed military does not speak out publicly, but the generals are outraged. A former national security official considers the relationship at the Pentagon between civilians and the military as worse than at any time in his long career.

If the current president is the one who is so pro-military, and if polls show that the American public trusts Bush in national security affairs more than they trust Kerry, why does the military hate the Bush administration? Why do they hate Rumsfeld? Sour grapes? Liberal propaganda?

Remember, this is Novak. He ain't exactly an objective journalist.

We're on hiatus.