Feeling a bit of a draft

Is there a kinder, gentler way to say, "backdoor draft"?

President George W. Bush authorized the Marine Corps to issue involuntary recall orders to members of the Individual Ready Reserve, part of the non-active force.

The U.S. Marine Corps will start recalling thousands of inactive service members in the coming months to counter a steady decline in the number of non-active troops volunteering for duty.

It seems Bush will be able to keep feeding the meat grinder in Iraq without ever needing to call for an official draft, something the GOP are loathe to do. Given how unpopualr the war is right now, an actual draft would be a political death knell. But Bush has got 35,000 Marines who can be yanked over there at a moments notice; plenty of IED fodder until he's gone. And then the next commander-in-chief will get to deal with that mess. Just like Bush promised.

The behaviour displayed by this administration toward the troops -- -- inadequate armour, VA budget cuts, bureacuratic abuse of the injured upon return, shuttering Walter Reed mostly because its proximity probably made Bush a tad squimish and, of course, the stop-loss orders -- will have some serious long term consequences for the US military. This is not a hard conclusion to come by and many others have already come to it, as both Murtha and Hagel have said the treatment of the soldiers, both directly and as a result of a grinding, undefined mission, is killing the military. Unfortunately, no one wants to really understand what these guys mean by this. But military men are the first ones to understand what this kind of treatment will mean in the long run.

Which is possibly why the Bush administration seems hell bent on creating more poor people. They know that, after dicking over the grunts both on the combat field and over medical treatment back home, they have pretty much sunk any reputation the military might have had as a viable career path option. Think of the Bush policy poverty-inducement programs as another form of "involuntary recall." The beauty of it is that it will have the appearance of looking entirely voluntary.