Having just spent a week at a ski resort in Northern California, I am pleased to report that while thousands of the best and brightest of our citizens are being used for target practice by insurgents all over the world, especially in Iraq, quite a few of those who do not serve are dressed in Desert Storm styled snowboard outfits, even to the point of wearing military looking helmets.  There they are, literally careening down the slopes in the Sierra, in garb that Norman Schwartzkofph (sp?) would approve. 

Are they thinking of their sisters and brothers out there fighting so they can continue to 'ski free or die'? Of course not.  They are doing what we are all doing, anything we feel like, because this Administration has failed to make this our war.  Other than their parents and families, our troops are out there on their own, on some undefined mission that may soon lead to the deployment of even more troops, and for what reason, exactly?  To free a nation that could care less about being free?  To democratize a group of people who historically have been drawn to strong men who subjugate those who have literally minor differences with them?

Sorry, folks, but unless and until we put this war on the front burner, not the rhetorical burner of whether we have a troop 'surge' (is that like the surge that can destroy our computer if we don't have a surge protector?), but the front burner that involves us all, not just a few, we have no focus, we have no goal.  I do not favor a draft, but at least imposing a draft would finally force us, as a nation, as we did during Vietnam, to decide what is best for us, for our country, for the world.  It would force those 20 somethings on the slope to worry for just a brief moment that the uniform they wear so frivolously on the slopes might become a real uniform, imposing a real duty on them. 

And while I'm posting, time to recruit in Dearborn, Michigan.  Why did we have to see dancing Iraqi-American teenagers after Hussein was executed when they should be the first on the lines to help their native land?  I'm tired of non-Iraqi origin Americans dying for a fight that is theirs to sustain.  Let them take up arms to free their relatives from the insurgency, rather than looking like wannabe rappers and homies on the streets of Michigan.