Gautam wrote:
Geez, Doug, don't elevate the stakes here. First (you mentioned the draft, which I snipped, sorry) we certainly don't need a draft to put another, say, 100,000 troops in Iraq (which would put us at about 250,000, which is where we need to be). It is within the capacity of the US military to do that. The MIT Political Science Department is heavily Democratic and I just watched a bunch of liberal Democratic Security Studies professors attack Kerry for what they called "fear-mongering" over the draft. They'll all vote for him, but they think he's apallingly dishonest on this topic. So I don't think you're right on that.
Are you saying that we could easily get 100k to volunteer to go to Iraq, or that we presently have the manpower to do so? I was under the impression that our military was overextended - bolstered by the observation that many functions once undertaken by servicemen and women at military bases (and even in Iraq) are now being performed by civilians.
Even more than that, as I said above, don't elevate the stakes in this war. I think we should make every effort to win, certainly. But if President Kerry announced on January 20th "We're getting the hell out of that godforsaken country" (as at least one of my professors wants him to do) the United States would remain the most powerful nation in the world by the widest margin of any nation in the history of the world. The military would be back up to its prewar state of readiness within a year. The American economy would (assuming oil price stability) continue on largely unaffected. It would not be the end of the world. It wouldn't even be the end of multipolarity. It would be _unfortunate_ (most particularly for the people of Iraq). But that's all it would be. China would still be dependent on exports to the US. Europe would still be fading into irrelevance. Russia would still be trying to rebuild a shattered economy and country and _also_ dealing with one of the worst demographic catastrophes in human history. The worst possible outcome from this war would be _bad_, but (as Adam Smith said) "There's a lot of ruin in a nation" and there's much more ruin in this nation.
Don't you see Iran being the big winner if we pull out? What kind of threat to the stability of the region would an Iraq/Iran alliance be? What if they formed a close relationship to the EU and/or Russia? Will they be a threat to the Saudis? What will the consequences be regarding Israel? How will countries like Japan react to demonstrated weakness?
-- Doug $2.34/g for regular this morning maru _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
