Not quite the draft

According to the AP, the Army is involuntarily recalling 5,600 of what are called Individual Ready Reserve to active duty . Now, I'm not at all an expert on military affairs, but my understanding is that this is not does not speak well for the progress of the mission in Iraq. Like the extension of the tours of many servicemen and women, this speaks of a military that hasn't planned adequately for its mission, that is otherwise unprepared to accomplish stated goals, that is calling pouring more and more men and women into combat. In short, a quagmire.

Although an illusory sovereignty has been handed over to the Iraqis, the war (or counterinsurgency, or whatever) is clearly not over. American troops (and of course Iraqis) will continue dying by the hundreds or perhaps thousands in Iraq for years to come. Surely Iraq is no VietNam; while the war may still mean the world to many neoconservatives and other firm believers in American empire or Bushism or America's infallibility, it is already an unpopular war, and even many of this war's early boosters, including much of the Bush administration, want it over as cleanly and neatly as possible.

So how do you square the increasing need for warm bodies in Iraq with a strong political desire on all sides to see the war end? Well, isn't that what a quagmire is?

While it remains politically unimaginable that the number of Active Duty US servicemen in Iraq will ever approach, say, 500,000, the situation there will remain a burden for US foreign policy for some time, demonstrating to our enemies that we are weak and preventing us from responding to legitimate crises. While a minority of Americans will persist in seeing any failure in the Iraq mission as the result of betrayal by domestic sayers (Matt Yglesias' "stab in the back") or an illusion created by a liberal media conspiracy, those either unburdened of right-wing partisan allegiance or burdened by reality, including a growing majority of Americans, will see the second Gulf War as, at best, a good idea spoiled by incompetence, and, at worst, a tragic bloody mistake. The prosecution of this war is reason enough that Bush should be forced from office.