Soldiering on for Wesley Clark

I'm a 20+ year Army veteran, and I have a son who is a senior airman currently on active duty. I entered active service in 1977, so while I served with quite a few draftees, mostly I'm a product of the "All Volunteer" force.

I'm support Wes Clark and believe no one is as qualified, by ability experience or character to lead this country. But Wes Clark does NOT support a return to the draft. This is one area where I disagree with him.

My reasons for supporting the draft are basically these:

1) A nation should never go to war unless it's willing to commit all its resources to the endeavor. If it ain't important enough for everyone to sacrifice, it ain't worth fighting. A small professional military makes it far too easy for the government to engage in military adventurism without the civilian population giving a damn. Pretty much what we have now.

I strongly believe that if we had a draft, there would be a lot more pressure on the administration to get out of Iraq, a greater demand to hold them accountable for their incompetence there, and probably a lot more public discussion and thoughtfulness before we went there in the first place. And yeah, I know it took many years and far too many deaths for sentiment against the Vietnam War to formulate, but this is a different time, with different attitudes and much better communications about what's really going on in distant lands.