Or to put it another way thelead editorial in today's New York Times contains the first reference to something I expect to hear a lot of in the next year:

"But if the goal was clear, and people understood how to reach it, Mr. Bush could compensate. He could even bolster the desperately straitened military with a draft if Americans understood the need to sacrifice."

The word I am referring is to is DRAFT. It has to come. The other alternative is for the Bushies to cut and run.

Incidentally, I expect them to cut and run. I expect them to say that they did the right thing to pull out on June 30 because when the place explodes like a powder keg the Republicans are going to claim how smart they were in putting American soldiers out of harms way.

If the country will not accept a draft for Iraq then those who say that we should not have gone in the first place have a good argument.

I am willing to concede that it is possible that we could not have known, even with all the intelligence at our disposal, that Osama was going to use hijacked airplanes as missiles. It is not possible for professional military people (including, but only as a joke, Donald Rumsfeld) to think they were going into Iraq for less than 10 years. And I don't know how you get people to volunteer for that kind of war.