So right does President Bush feel the war on Iraq was — even though his reasons for sending your kids there keeps changing — that he is quietly working to reinstate the draft.

Of course, he has no plans to fire it up until after the election.

Michael Lenz, writing for SeaCoastOnline, notes,

Despite our Marines? complaints of fatigue (and rightly so) and the realization that American troops are indeed stretched to capacity around the globe, it appears unlikely that President Bush would reinstate a national draft before the 2004 presidential election….

“If President Bush is re-elected, it is likely that he will reinstate the draft. The war on terrorism will not end in Iraq, but instead will proceed into countries like Syria and Iran,” said [former Defense Department employee who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and Washington Post] Ellsberg.

For the time being, Rumsfield and, presumably, Bush are denying that they will reinstate the draft. After all, running into an election year, that would be lunacy. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports,

President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld won’t go near the subject — at least not on the record. But in November the Pentagon placed a notice on its Web site seeking “men and women in the community who might be willing to serve as members of a local draft board.”

It’s important for the American public to remember that this is the same President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who said we absolutely, 100% had no choice but to attack Iraq because Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. When it turned out that he did not have weapons of mass destruction, both declared that it didn’t really matter anyway. We needed to take him out.

So remember this as he promises not to send your kids to fight in Pakistan, Iran, Syria — notably Korea has been left out of the picture, although they have apparently bragged about having weapons of mass destruction, too (but no oil) — after the election is over, it won’t matter that we don’t need the draft.

Related Links

• Bush/Rumsfeld recruiting local draft boards
• Clark: Draft will return under Bush
• News, Reviews & Articles on Selective Service System [SSS]
• Dateline Alabama: Bush drives to fill draft and appeal board positions