Rumsfeld to Senators: Get Ready To Start the Draft, or Impeach the President

Senators asked Rumsfeld on Thursday for a timetable for leaving Iraq; Rumsfeld responded that doing so would "throw terrorists a lifeline", telling them when they have to hold out until.

This is bad strategy and it is bad policy.

Because, if you've been reading the news, you'd know that recruitment targets for the armed forces have been missed again and again the first half of this year. The Senators want to know: is the situation so bad in Iraq that we going to have to start drafting people? By saying "we are there forever", Rumsfeld is telling the Senators that we are either going to be undermanned in Iraq within a year -- making impossible for us to put down the insurgency -- , or that the draft is going to start.

Will the US public face a draft to fight the insurgency in Iraq, in a war that 60% of the public now believes President Bush and Company deliberately misled us into, using lies? No.

So, Rumsfeld's answer to the Senators -- sorry, no timeline -- means our Iraq policy is adrift, and we will either be drafting boys (and girls!) to fight and die in a war we were misled into, or we will simply see the quagmire deepen.

In response, Sen Kennedy, exasperated, asked Rumsfeld, given all your failures, isn't it time for you to resign? Rumsfeld responded, exasperated, "I've offered my resignation to the President twice." The implication is clear -- if we want out of this quagmire, we have to remove President Bush. So, what do you do to a President who willfully lied to the people to bring us into a needless war? That sounds impeachable.