Insert Clever Blog Name Here

Let's start with the draft. There is a bill in Congress to reinstate the draft. It was introduced by Rep. Charles Rangel, who is a DEMOCRAT from New York. Yes, Bush's administration is doing what needs to be done to maintain our forces through retention. John Kerry was talking about adding tens of thousands of troops to our current strength. Our all volunteer army has had record sign-ups since 9/11, but nothing near the rate Kerry was talking about. He never would say how he proposed to do that without a draft.

Regarding the "draft dodging" performed by Mr. Bush, I'll point this out: Bush volunteered to join the Guard. His daddy may or may not have pulled some strings to get him into the pilot training program of the Air National Guard, but G.W. still had to pass all the tests to finish the training. He then flew F-102s. The F-102 was one of the most dangerous fixed wing fighters to fly. Also, when Bush was in the National Guard, we were still at the height of the Cold War and the Soviet Union was constantly flying into US air space with recon aircraft as well as bombers. The F-102 was commonly used to interdict the Soviet aircraft and fly as an "escort", though they were mostly there to be ready to shoot them down if they started acting up. Bush may not have had to do this, but it is not out of the question for it to have been asked of him at some point. Every time he strapped on that F-102 and took off, he was taking a chance, Soviets or no.

The National Guard has been called to active duty over seas since it's inception in 1913. Remember reading about World War 1 or World War II? National Guard units fought overseas in both of those wars. The National Guard can be federalized, at which point it becomes part of the United States military. Anyone who joins the National Guard with the idea that they'll never be sent overseas hasn't paid attention to their history books.

Finding a six foot tall Arab on dialysis has proven more difficult than one would expect, but I assure you that American soldiers are still looking for him. While some units were pulled out of Afghanistan to go into Iraq, other units replaced them. The Russians worked for a decade trying to turn the Afghan people into subjects. We've been in there for three years and barely that.

WMDs. Saddam had WMDs. They were gone by the time we got in there. How long they had been gone? I don't know. Saddam had from the early 1990s to move them. If he was smart, he moved them to Syria, or through it to the Beka Valley in Lebanon. A decade and more than a dozen UN resolutions didn't make him give them up.

WMDs were not the only reason to go into Iraq. After 9/11, Bush gave a speech in which he said that the US was going to go after terrorists and treat nations that harbor and fund terrorists as terrorists and to go after them, too. "But Saddam wasn't linked with Al Qaeda," you say? Ansar Al Islam had a training camp in Iraq between the Kurdish region and the town of Tikrit. Ansar Al Islam is funded by Al Qaeda. That one not good enough for you? How about this: Saddam paid the families of Palestinian terrorists $25,000 if the terrorist killed any Israelis. Funding terrorism, right there.

You mention that we went into Iraq for oil and to finish the job that George H.W. Bush couldn't finish. I'll remind you that A) G.W. wants to drill for oil in Alaska. Reasons for this are numerous, but the best one is because it reduces our dependency on foreign oil. Why go to war over foreign oil if you can get it here? Besides, Saudi Arabia has more oil and is more easily accessible. The equipment's already there and run largely by Americans, and we already have a military presence there. We could have made war on them for oil, which would have made more sense from a logistical and tactical perspective. The war for oil bit doesn't wash. B) I remind you that Saddam Hussein did try to have George H.W. Bush assassinated in the early 1990s while he was still president. Last time I checked, assassinating or attempting to assassinate a head of state is an act of war. The fact that Iraq did not become synonymous with "World's Largest Glass Covered Parabolic Dish" in 1991 is a testament to American restraint.