Say Anything Blog

Every day, it seems, another anti-war twit on the left (which is not all of them, but apparently the most vocal) trots out the Viet Nam/Iraq connection. Never mind that this time we are not facing an organized government with support from two superpowers, skip the desert terrain vs. jungle, don't bother with the incremental level of our involvement in one with our diminishing presence in the other, omit the establishment of a freely elected native government, gloss over the casualty figures that are a fraction of the prior conflict, and a horde of other differences -- the important thing is that the Viet Nam war was bad, and the war in Iraq is bad, so we must make every single parallel we can.

This morning, one of the Boston Globe's pet whackos slipped out of her straightjacket and got access to a computer again. Joan Venocchi's grand idea? Bring back the draft!

Now I don't know much about Ms. Venocchi, but I'm pretty comfortable in assuming she was against the draft when it was actually a relevant topc 30 years ago. What's convinced her to switch her position? She believes that it will increase opposition to the war.

The unspoken presumption behind this is that if we send enough unwilling people to Iraq, eventually they and their families will rise up, join the anti-war side, and end the US involvement in Iraq. It's an interesting theory. "Interesting," as in the "I don't think I've seen so much concentrated stupidity in one place before" sense.