A plea for a little help from my readers:

I had figured that after the election, most of the nonsense that was going on about the "draft to come" would calm down, and fair enough, it did. Howard Dean isn't mentioning it as a centerpoint of his campaign for DNC chair. It's not turned up on Democratic talking points in recent weeks. Indeed, now that the election's over, it's not much in the news.

There's a reason for this: it was always a pretty flimsy prediction. First it was premised a bill put forward by Charles Rangel. (This didn't bother some law professors.) Then it was premised on difficulties in recruiting for the National Guard. [1]. Now, it's premised on the idea that we're going to war with Iran.

I've referred to this kind of thing before as "political haruspicy." I'm wary of doing it myself, although I've made a prediction or two. (Most notably, that same-sex marriage or civil unions will be legal in all 50 states by 2008, although now I'm leaning towards 2010.) On the internet, it's especially dangerous, because your predictions can be so easily referenced.

But predictions about the draft seem particularly pernicious to me, because they started with a credulous acceptance of "alert" emails which left out salient information (such as Charlie Rangel), and have proceeded from distortion to distortion. So this weekend, I'll be launching a page: the Cassandras of the Draft. It'll be a permanent link from my homepage, and will allow my readers to add links and quotations from any of the Augurs of Impending Doom. I'll also include a countdown clock, giving the exact number of days, hours, minutes, and seconds until Bush has not started a draft. Who knows: if a draft actually does start, I'll be making these people look like predictive geniuses. On the other hand, if no draft occurs then no one will be able to disclaim their words.

In any event, I need a good list to get this going. So I'd like to use this entry as an initial clearinghouse while I'm designing the page. If any of my readers know of a pundit, blogger, politician, or other notable who has predicted a Bush reimposition of the draft, please drop a comment and a link below. And if you have a chance, spread the word.

Oh, and one rule: we're talking about a general draft, one actually involving the selective service. Not a "back door draft" involving the use of military contracts, drafting people into AmeriCorps, or whatever else. Let's keep it focused with this general rule: if it doesn't involve selective service cards, it probably doesn't belong here.

[1]: Chris and I recently had a discussion over why overheated rhetoric does one little good for analysis, and this is one reason. Yes, we're having a hard time recruiting for the National Guard. A serious discussion would ask whether we were having trouble recruiting for the non-reserve military, and whether, were we to reverse the troop cuts of the early 1990s, we'd be able to fill the ranks. But it's not particularly surprising to find out that when both reserves and non-reserve ranks are being called up, fewer people wish to volunteer for reserves.

There's a serious criticism of Rumsfeld's policies on troop strength, and a criticism that I have great sympathy with: that whatever the long-term costs, we should increase the size of our standing army (and even raise taxes to pay for it) because calling up reserves on a long-term basis is bad for morale and effectiveness. Pushing this would have been an excellent issue in the last election. Instead, much of the democratic intellectual firepower was focused on scaring Americans with the fantasy of an upcoming draft.