Sherlock Holmes lived in England. Except that he didn't. He's not real, you see, so he didn't really live anywhere. Except that, in a sense, he did. This is the phenomenon that philosophers call "truth in fiction." The point is that an author gets to create his or her own reality in which people who aren't real exist and have homes and personalities, and we, the readers, can say things about them.
As has been reported in this week's New York Times Magazine, thoughts along these lines are coursing through the incumbent administration. A senior adviser to George W. Bush explained that Ron Suskind's problem is that he, like me, is a member of "the reality-based community" composed of folks who "believe that solutions emerge from [our] judicious study of discernible reality." What we don't get is that because America is "an empire now," "when we act, we create our own reality." Just as if Bush and Co. were writing a book. Except they're running a country.
The particular fiction they're working on is fascinating and multifaceted, encompassing all sorts of variant results in natural science, economics, and the study of foreign lands and global opinions. But one curious new element of the constructed reality that's of particular concern is the president's assertion, made in the second presidential debate and repeated last week in an e-mail to supporters, “We're not going to have a draft so long as I am the president."
From inside the reality-based community, this is an absurd and irresponsible promise. The previous periods of large-scale conscription in the United States -- during the Civil War and the two world wars -- were not the result of capricious decision making on the part of Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They were responses to national crises that required a scale of military manpower that could not be mustered by other means. None of the three leaders named wanted to see such a thing happen on his watch, but the crises came and the administrations' needed to deal with it. Bush has no way of guaranteeing that no crisis will arise under his watch, any more than he can promise there won't be hurricanes in Florida next year if he wins. But by running around the country swearing that, no matter what, he won't implement conscription, he sends an awful (indeed, one might say, "mixed") message to bad actors all around the world that the country is unwilling to do whatever it may take to defend itself. This is just the sort of projection of weakness that makes a crisis -- and therefore a draft -- more, rather than less, likely.
This aside, as I emphasized last week, the logic of the president's policies, commitments, and approaches to the world indicates that a draft is a not unlikely consequence of a second Bush administration. The current American deployment in Iraq is considered by all observers to be unsustainable over the long term. But the president promises to sustain it indefinitely. The administration's Iran policies point to a looming military conflict with the Islamic Republic, and Bush's war planners have a demonstrated record of badly underestimating the troop requirements of their ventures, a record that has not caused them to reconsider their approach. And even if a war with Iran on top of an unsustainable deployment in Iraq did not, itself, necessitate a draft, who knows what else might happen in the world were the United States to become so dangerously overexposed? Would North Korea do something rash? Would al-Qaeda launch another major strike while American soldiers were busy fighting Iraqi nationalists and Shia fundamentalists? Or what if the government of a major Islamic ally -- Egypt, Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia -- were to be overthrown by an increasingly radicalized population?
What's more, while a return to the mass conscription of the world wars may be far-fetched, an acute shortage of certain classes of specialists is far more plausible. Indeed, high-level Defense Department officials have already been discussing the possibility of such an event and ways to reconfigure the Selective Service System to better cope with it through a narrow draft of specialists. You can read the paperwork yourself thanks to the Freedom of Information Act.
But these documents and such are all just so "reality-based." In Bushworld, "the best way to avoid the draft is to vote for me" because "the person talking about a draft is my opponent." And Bush is always talking about terrorists, so … he must be a terrorist himself! Absurd as it all may sound, Bush has tools at his disposal to make people believe his stories are actually true. Rock the Vote has already been threatened by the Republican National Committee with loss of its tax-exempt nonprofit status if Rock the Vote won't stop implying that just because the president says there won't be a draft doesn't make it so. "We're an empire now," you see, and while leading even the strongest state in human history may not actually give you the power to create your own reality, it certainly does give you the power to change what people believe. Using your control of the Internal Revenue Service to try to stifle debate about subjects you find inconvenient, for example. Or smiling as your friends at Sinclair Broadcasting -- who, through their partial ownership of government contractors and dependence on friendly FCC rules -- profit mightily thanks to your policies and will continue to do so in the future, refusing to run news broadcasts about soldiers' deaths in Iraq and preempting local programming to air already discredited smear stories about your opponent.
These things happen, but in Vladimir Putin's Russia or the PRI's Mexico -- not in the United States of America. At least, not until recently.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
