In Coral Gables, Florida, during his closing statement of the first presidential debate, George W. Bush uttered the apparent non sequitur that, if he is re-elected, "the military will be an all-volunteer army." During the second debate, he got an actual question about the subject and replied: "I hear there's rumors on the Internets [sic] that we're going to have a draft. We're not going to have a draft, period." The president has reason to feel defensive. As the Associated Press recently reported, "the National Annenberg Election Survey found that 51 percent of adults age 18 to 29 believe Bush wants to reinstate the draft." Thirty percent of older adults agree. If those numbers go much higher, Bush will lose the election.
But the president is right. Amusing malapropism aside, the Internet rumor -- circulating in an email alleging that congressional Republicans intend to bring a bill reinstating the draft to the floor after Bush wins re-election -- are just that, rumors. The bill in question was introduced by liberal Democrats, primarily African-Americans, quite some time ago as a political stunt. They wanted to make the point that their constituents would bear a disproportionate burden of the fighting in a war the Republicans wanted. In an effort to quash the rumors, the GOP recently brought the bill to the floor, of the House where it was defeated by an overwhelming 402-2 margin.
There is, moreover, no particular reason to think the president is lying when he says he doesn't want a draft. The military says (rightly) that a draft would reduce the average combat effectiveness of American forces. Hawks, moreover, are enthusiastic about the all-volunteer force, which, for obvious reasons, makes it more politically feasible to start wars. It was Richard Nixon, after all, who ended the draft, and Jimmy Carter who re-instated the draft registration requirement that makes it possible to contemplate bringing it back.
Nevertheless, you can count me among the 51 percent of young adults who think that four more years of Bush means a comeback for conscription.
Asking whether or not the incumbent wants a draft is asking the wrong question. There can be little doubt the president didn't want to see the net loss of over 500,000 jobs on his watch. He certainly didn't want the occupation of Iraq to turn into the worsening mess that's overstretched our military and made talk of a renewed draft plausible. These policy failures didn't come about because the president wanted bad things to happen, they came about because you can't always get what you want, especially when your policymaking process is dominated by political hacks and know-nothing ideologues. Whether or not Bush wants a draft, the military will get what it needs, and his policies are likely to make it need just that. The reason is simple: more Bush means more war, likely against Iran.
The conventional wisdom among even liberal observers is that this is wrong. Jonathan Chait, no Bush apologist, made the counterargument in his LA Times column last Friday: "We don't have enough troops to fight the war we're in, let alone start another one. So there's no reason to fear Bush botching yet another war." This is comforting, but the logic is deeply flawed. On the eve of the Iraq War we didn't have enough troops deployed in the war we were fighting in Afghanistan and we did not -- as Chait observes -- have enough troops on tap to occupy Iraq properly. This was duly noted by war critics in the officer's corps and elsewhere, but did nothing to stop the march to war. Some elements inside the administration believed occupation duty would be easy and most of the heavy lifting would be done by the exile militia of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. Others believed that a stunning victory over Saddam Hussein would produce a "bandwagon effect," enticing European allies to contribute heavily to post-conflict stabilization operations in an effort to mend fences with a triumphant United States.
That's what Bush wanted, but it's not what happened. Hope is not a plan, as they say in the army -- except in the Bush White House, it is. It's just not a very good one.
Onward to Iran. Here Bush has a hope, that European negotiators will successfully persuade the Islamic Republic to halt its nuclear weapons program under threat of global sanctions. Unfortunately, as everyone following this issue on the left and the right understands, this hopeful plan won't work. The Europeans are unlikely to threaten or impose sanctions, and the Iranians are unlikely to give in to the threat. That leaves us with three options: a nuclear Iran, American concessions, or regime change. Bush has ruled out accepting the former option. His current policies indicate an unwillingness to countenance the second option. Worse, Bush's explanation of his opposition to the Kerry plan for negotiations with North Korea -- "that's exactly what Kim Jong Il wants" -- indicates that he fundamentally doesn't believe in negotiations with so-called "rogue states." The whole point of negotiating with Kim ought to be that we give him exactly what he wants in exchange for him giving us exactly what we want: a nuclear-free Korean peninsula. If Bush thinks this is a bad plan for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea it stands to reason that it's a bad plan for Iran.
The opposition to negotiations was not a mere slip of the tongue. Instead, it reflects a longstanding neoconservative belief that arms control negotiations with dictatorial regimes are worthless. That this belief was proven false with regard to the Soviet Union and North Korea has not altered it. In the former case, empirical evidence is ignored; in the latter case, the truth is simply distorted. Meanwhile, the president has promised not to allow Iran to go nuclear. And, as Laura Rozen and Newsweek's John Barry and Dan Ephron have recently been reporting, the president's friends have some ideas to stop it. These ideas all have two things in common: They won't require significant quantities of American troops, and the experts all agree they won't work. If implemented, these plans will set off a chain of events that, like the invasion of Iraq, will wind up requiring far more money and soldiers than their neoconservative backers anticipate.
A president inclined to let empirical evidence alter his judgment, to defer to the opinions of experts rather than discredited ideologues, would look at the situation and decide that he'd better negotiate. But for the past four years, we haven't had a president like that. Instead, the country's been led by a man who time and time again has fallen prey to wishful thinking, demonstrated a total disdain for expert views and empirical evidence, and preferred to solve problems through bold strokes. If he's re-elected, the odds are that he'll once again plunge forward into a military venture whose costs are likely to far exceed what he anticipates. And the next time around, there won't be any way to pay those costs without a return to conscription.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
