Another note to TORO as to the military draft option. The goal of the solution is help and do what is best for country. The draft would hopefully eliminate or at least reduce the stop-loss, extended tours and extra tours of our troups in such places like Iraq.
There's been a few threads on the draft. In the event of a large scale world war....I'm for the draft. But until the shit hits the fan...a draft would not work or be effective IMO, considering that Iraq is not a war in which is fought with front-lines and a clear enemy. If a draft were inacted today, you'd simply be sending more troops into the warzone with same situations and problems that we can't seem to solve. I used to be in favor of just drafting and sending a shit-load of troops over there to end this bastard. But that was at the beginning of the war when it was only about 2 years old. If we had just sent in that many troops to begin with, we may have a different situation.
Some say it would be cheaper, it wouldn't. If you wanted to raise a larger force, it would cost money. Not to mention it would be equally expensive in that they would need the same equipment, supplies, training, etc... All you're doing is replacing people who want to be there with people who don't. Then you have to worry about draft dodgers and AWOLs.
Because Iraq is an unpopular war, the draft will not work as it is designed to. Case in point--Vietnam. (I'm not comparing the characteristics to Vietnam, but the shear unpopularity of the war itself)....hell one of our Presidents was a draft dodger from the Vietnam era. As far as stop-loss, I don't believe a draft would do either, in a draft, the gov. and military sets the time limit. Vietnam just happened to be 1 tour of about a year (correct vets?--give or take a year for a tour in Vietnam?) However, in WWII, you were drafted, and sent for the duration of the war. If you were wounded, you healed, and they sent you back if you could fight.
I'm not quite sure a draft would be the best thing for Iraq right now, unless something really drastic happened and another country got involved, against us. Feel free to prove me wrong though, it's happened before.