Is military draft in the works?

Chicago Sun-Times
April 24, 2004

There´s a sign on the horizon, no bigger than a man´s hand, that there´s a military draft in the works. The Defense Department has announced that Selective Service is making preparations for another draft, "in case one is needed." The New York Times in an inane editorial pleads with the president to articulate a goal for the war that if it "was clear and comprehensive and people understood how to reach it, then Mr. Bush could . . . even bolster the desperately straitened military with a draft if Americans understood the need to sacrifice."

Bush has made "the war on terrorism" a mantra to cover everything his administration has done. But the Iraq war has nothing to do with the war on terrorism, as we now know. It was a plan of Cheney and Rumsfeld and their coterie of "neo-conservative" intellectuals (like Paul Wolfowitz) long before they came to power. It was supposed to make the United States a major power in the Middle East; to provide a democratic alternative to the typical Arab autocracy; to give the United States control of major oil fields; to take pressure off Israel, and to establish that the United States was a superpower that could go anywhere in the world and do anything it wanted. The "war on terror" was only a pretext to implement this plan, as accounts of the early White House reaction to the Sept. 11 attack seem to indicate.