The road to a draft goes through an unwilling Army

Good editorial in the Seattle P-I:

In February 2003, the former chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that "several hundred thousand soldiers" would be needed to occupy Iraq. Shinseki wasn't wrong: 300,000 U.S. soldiers, twice the current deployment, is a barely adequate minimum. But the Army's end strength for fiscal year 2005 is 482,400 soldiers, with only another 20,000 authorized. Rather, Shinseki had publicly made clear that only a draft will generate enough soldiers to effectively occupy Iraq.

Indeed, a draft could generate so many soldiers that the Bush administration and its neocon ideologues might feel able to invade, conquer and occupy Iran and Syria, presumably to turn them, too, into democratic countries.