Challenger April

On April tenth, my trip to the mailbox was not met with the usual deluge of birthday cards. I guess aunts and uncles decide to stop sending them when you turn eighteen. However, I did find one slim piece of paperboard waiting for me. Upon entering my house I realized what this innocent piece of paper was. It was a reminder that I needed to register with Selective Services within the month to avoid committing a felony. For the uninitiated, this means that in the event of a military draft, I will already be filed, numbered, and grouped for selection. Though many movies, songs, and books speak of the draft card, and it's image, burning in the hand of a 1970's protester is still fresh in my mind, I did not feel rebellious when I received mine in the mail a week ago. Instead, I just worried about the state of the war and wondered what exactly it would become.

Though there has not been a draft since theVietnam War, Iraq is looking more and more like our generation's Vietnam. Though a draft would be political suicide for the president who enacts it, the need for more troops is growing. After all, both wars seemed to be guaranteed US victories at the outset, but soon fell into the realm of sneak attacks and guerrilla tactics. Both wars were dragged out much longer than the US had planned them to; the Iraqi War still continues. Though Vietnam was a war of the many versus the few, the few, an army sans airforce, was able to weather the many, the world's strongest nation, through sheer persistence. The Iraqi war could be just as socially, politically, and economically polarizing as the Vietnam War was over thirty years ago.

Not to be inflammatory, but, just as there was no Gulf of Tonkin incident, it is growing more and more apparent that there are no WMDs. Whether this was simply a fault or misinterpretation of intelligence, as the heads of the CIA and FBI claim or the product of a longstanding Bush family vendetta against Hussein or their friendship with the Iranian ruling family, the situation in Iraq will not disappear overnight. Hindsight may be 20/20, but at this point the United States and our generation is mired in at least fifteen to twenty years of Iraqi involvement. This is, quite simply a fact that we must learn to deal with. At this point, the conflict is not about winning or losing. It's about finding safety for both the threatened American soldiers and the Iraqi citizens, whose world has been turned upside down this past couple of years. As Colin Powell told George W. Bush before the war, if you invade Iraq, you will own Iraq. So, with the death toll rising, blame games raging, ambushes coming daily, Iraq in Bush's hands and a draft card in mine, this all seems real for the first time.