Charlie Rangel has it exactly right. Democrats should talk about the draft. It is the way to do two things:
- Make everyone pushing for more troops tell where the soldiers are going to come from.
- Give the American public a voice in the debate.
Follow the jump for more...and take a poll on the draft!
We should frame it like this:
You want to send in more troops? There are no more troops. There will be NO MORE stop loss, and no more rotations into Iraq for soldiers who have already served. There is only ONE place where more troops can come from: a military draft of all citizens aged 18-42.
If you want to try ONE LAST PUSH then we need more soldiers. Our troops have given and given and we will NOT ask them to give yet again while the rest of us do nothing.
No draft. No more troops.
If we do this we can win the debate in two ways: 1) It will shut down the "one last push" meme coming from people like John McCain. 2) It protects us against what happened to Dems after Vietnam where we got slammed for being "soft" on the war.
We can truthfully say, "All right, if the American people want to continue this war, then I'm sure they'll support a draft...and if they don't, then it's time to end this war!"