Alter: We're Dodging the Draft Issue

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6099727/site/newsweek/

It's a potentially lethal issue—the kind that could make young voters swarm to the polls and their nervous parents change their minds about supporting President Bush. Republicans are peeved over Democratic claims that the president will impose a draft if he's re-elected. John Kerry was hammered for mildly suggesting that such an idea was even "possible." Bush backers are right that this is a suburban myth and no such plans are underway. A scary and misleading Democratic e-mail circulating on college campuses highlights pending legislation to revive the draft and efforts by the administration to bolster local Selective Service boards. Predictably, the e-mail doesn't mention that the draft bills, which are going nowhere, are sponsored mostly by Democrats (who think military service falls too heavily on minorities) and that the draft-board system is being kept well oiled because of old laws requiring it—not some nefarious Bush plot. "Not. Gonna. Happen," concludes conservative columnist Michelle Malkin.

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But the world is a strange and unpredictable place. While Bush has no plans to reinstate a draft, he could be forced into it by events. Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, a likely presidential candidate in 2008, says that a draft "might become necessary" in the years ahead. The threshold question before the election is this: which candidate is more likely to have so few international friends amid a crisis that he would have to move beyond the all-volunteer force? This question takes the seemingly arcane issue of burden-sharing and brings it home to the American heartland. If we need, God forbid, to occupy another country that truly threatens the United States, we will either do it with the help of our allies or with the conscription of our kids.

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IranAs the crisis unfolded, we would approach our allies. If we had repaired our tattered relations with them and they felt the United States was again exercising sound judgment, they would join us to de-nuclearize and stabilize Iran. If they didn't, and we faced an occupation that would make Iraq look easy, we would unquestionably have to impose a draft. It doesn't take a nuclear scientist to figure out which presidential candidate this year would have a better chance of making a fresh start in securing the cooperation of our allies when the world erupts again, in Iraq, Iran, North Korea or anywhere else. Diplomacy works. Five years after Bill Clinton's war in Kosovo, 100 percent of the peacekeeping is handled by foreign troops.