Disturbing

James Pinkerton makes the case that the current war in Iraq is likely to spin out of control into something much, much more brutal.
I am afraid that he is right. If we wind up going after Iran (and I believe that any attack on Iran or attempt to bring about a coup will lead to a full-on war), then the only alternative to a draft will be to bring to bear massive firepower, i.e. slaughter the population. We can't defeat Iran and hold it without huge numbers of ground troops under the normal rules of war, but we can probably defeat it if we simply kill anything that moves.
Syria we could probably take, but that would overextend our troops further and require either that we either pull a lot of troops out of other countries, or that we accept a lot more chaos in Iraq and Syria than we have right now because we lack the troops to contain the violence.

That is all.