Rumors of Draft Are Hard to Kill Despite Denials
By CHRISTOPHER COOPER Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The e-mails popped up this past spring and have been circulating at an increasingly furious pace. Their unsettling message: The Bush administration, bogged down in Iraq, has made a secret pact with a lame-duck senator and a liberal congressman to resume the military draft as early as next June.
Like many rumors, this one contains a germ of truth: Legislation in Congress would resurrect the draft -- this time for young women as well as young men. But "the bill is collecting dust," says Ilene Zeldin, a spokeswoman for Democratic Sen. Ernest Hollings of South Carolina, the Senate bill's author. The House bill, by Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel of New York, is dormant too. "Rangel hasn't pushed the issue," says spokesman Emile Milne. And the Bush administration has said repeatedly it has no plans to reinstitute the draft, which ended in 1973.
Despite the denials, the draft-comeback rumors seem to be gaining strength. Their resiliency suggests that many Americans have anxieties lurking just below the surface over the conflict in Iraq. With U.S. forces stretched thin in Iraq and Afghanistan, and thousands of Army reservists required to serve extended tours of duty, the idea that the draft may have to be reinstituted strikes some as plausible, if not inevitable.
Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry last week fueled the concern -- perhaps in a bid to improve his standing with women, who may be particularly sensitive to the potential costs of the war. Mr. Kerry hinted that the draft might return in a second Bush term. "If George Bush were to be re-elected, given the way he has gone about this war and given his avoidance of responsibility in North Korea and Iran and other places, is it possible? I can't tell you," Mr. Kerry said.
Ralph Nader, meanwhile, began raising the prospect months ago. "Young Americans need to know that a train is coming," he said in April.
The Bush administration is trying to defuse the potentially explosive issue. Secretary of State Colin Powell, appearing yesterday on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," said that "President Bush has no plans for a draft, nor is a draft needed," because the military has enough volunteers.
The bills reinstating the draft were introduced in January 2003, a few months before the Iraq war, for somewhat different reasons. The 82-year-old Mr. Hollings, who is retiring at the end of this year, has long believed that national service builds character. Mr. Rangel, who has many poor and minority constituents, said he wanted to make the point that both rich and poor should share the burden of any Iraq war, which he opposed. He has nevertheless gotten many complaints from people asking " 'how he could get in bed with Bush,' " says his spokesman, Mr. Milne.
Pentagon Opposition
Any effort to reimpose the draft would be resisted by the Pentagon, which has long argued that an all-volunteer force produces a superior military. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in January 2003, said that many people who would have been the most desirable recruits for the Vietnam War found ways to avoid the draft. "Big categories were exempted: people who were in college, people who were teaching, people who were married," he said. "And what was left was sucked into the intake, trained for a period of months, and then went out, adding no value, no advantage, really, to the United States armed services." He later apologized for his remarks, which drew the ire of Vietnam veterans.
The e-mails also say that the Selective Service System, which would be responsible for managing a draft if one were reinstituted, just received $28 million "to prepare for a military draft that could start as early as June 15, 2005." Selective Service did receive $26.3 million from Congress this year, but that constitutes its entire annual budget, which hasn't changed in three years and is likely to remain flat in 2005. "We haven't been in any secret meetings -- we're getting smaller," says Pat Schuback, an agency spokesman.
The agency, which once had thousands of employees, today has just 163. Since 1980, its primary job has been to oversee the mandatory registration with the government of young men ages 18 to 25.
'Not Getting Ready'
To try to damp draft rumors, the agency put a notice on its Web site: "Notwithstanding recent stories in the news media and on the Internet, Selective Service is not getting ready to conduct a draft for the U.S. Armed Forces."
The source of the e-mails remains a mystery, in part because unsolicited e-mail is notoriously hard to track. Mr. Milne suspects that Mr. Nader may be behind it; perhaps coincidentally, Mr. Nader has used some of the language that's in the e-mails. However, his spokesman, Kevin Zeese, says the Nader campaign is aware of the e-mail, but didn't create it.
It's easy to see how such e-mails get widespread circulation. Christian Erhardt, a 27-year-old German national and New Jersey resident who is working as a marketing manager for a European camera company, says he got several copies of the e-mail in recent days, and forwarded a copy to 800 people, many in the media. "I don't have any children yet," he said in an e-mail exchange, "but believe me I don't want [them] to have to go to war."