Back on the Press Gang

Ladies and Gentlement, Jacob Weisberg, starring in If We're Gonna Fight These Dang Aggressive Wars, We're Gonna Need a Draft.

Weisberg's thesis, so far as he draws near to something resembling a thesis, is that while it was just dandy to have an all-volunteer military back when we were just dickin' around in Mogadishu, we've moved on to bigger and better things. Or, in the maestro's words, "Iraq changed all that."

There's a depressing tendency among supposedly serious political writers to affect the tone of fashion journalists. Iraq changed all that? It's like André Leon Talley noting a trend away from distressed denim. I presume that Jake recalls that he advocated for this brand-name No Palatable Solutions conflict back when the all-voluntary army was working out just fine, thank ya vury much.

It's true: our all-volunteer military isn't don' so hot as an occupying power. Rational minds might tell you that George, Dick, and Uncle Crazy over at the DoD have more to do with that than the particular demographics of the military on any given Sunday. But rational minds, alas, are rarely employed as opionists, who are vocationally obliged to treat their past positions less like a palimsest than like a raging fire from which they must forever flee . . . and never turn back.

"The scale of death and injury" in Iraq, Jake says, justify the draft. Nary a mention that they justify a reconsideration of the policy that put us there in the first place.