You've covered lots of ground. Good rant.
Your thoughts on a draft?
Briefly, I believe we should have mobilized manpower and industry in Sept 01. Not doing so told the world we were willing to go to a number of gunfights with switchblades and on the cheap.
Precisely!
We don't need a draft.
Big conscript armies are not what is needed. Good sized professional armies are better.
We needed to be a lot more willing to use our biggest advantage: air power, to devastate those towns and villages in the Sunni areas where there is constant resistance. We surrounded Fallujah, backed off, then surrounded it again, and fought house to house. We should have surrounded it the first time, not backed off, and levelled it with airpower. That would have caused a lot of civilian casualties. So what?
We should have declared war, which would have allowed us to ditch the post-Korean War precedents and clearly and unambiguously used the World War II precedents, including press censorship. Solid press censorship from the beginning would have prevented the Abu Graib story from doing as much damage to us as it did.
But that's all water under the bridge and can't be undone.
What we still CAN do to win the war is arm the Kurds to defend themselves and their autonomy, and arm the government-led Shi'ite Arabist forces, giving them the firepower to decimate the rebellious Sunnis, and the ability to operate against the Sunnis using their own strength (instead of relying on the pro-Iranian Shi'ite militias). This will give the Arabist Shi'ites who already control the government in theory the sort of firepower and real power to run their own show. It will mean the ethnic cleansing of the Sunni Arabs (who are our mortal enemies there anyway, so that's a net plus in returning the country to stability), and it will allow for nice sharp civil strife between pro-Iranian Shi'ites and Arabist Iraqi Shi'ites. The end of that game is a victory for the government there, especially if we interdict within Iran and use special ops to start sowing mayhem in the Iranian provinces.
Of course arming the Kurds and giving them our full backing will mean that the government forces will be essentially limited to killing Sunni Arabs and pro-Iranian Shi'ites. We should be clear that we will use airpower and arm Kurds to the teeth to prevent any sort of Shi'ite Arab effort to subjugate oil-rich Kurdistan.
This will give us a divided state with two clear victors, empty Sunni lands, and a decimated pro-Iranian faction. Of course it will mean a bloody civil war that kills tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, wrecks certain regions of the country, and results in a flood of Sunni refugees into Syria. So what? We will WIN, in the sense that we will dominate the politics of Iraq in the aftermath, and still be there. And OUR TROOPS will not do the fighting or the dying. Iraqis will.
That victory we can achieve. But we're aiming at something pie-in-the-sky and Wilsonian, in which all parties share and share alike and get along in a reunified Iraq. Asking Kurds and Shi'ite Arabs to "get along" with the Sunni Ba'athists is like asking Jews to get along with Nazis in a reconstituted Reich. Some things are humanely impossible, and naive to suggest.
Now, you can complain that he did this but I think he was facing a choice: either keep the economy going OR put the nation on an austere war footing, which would, I grant you, have made people realize we are at war. In the process, however, we would have seen a collapse of the economy when people went into a panic and stayed at home.
This is a decision that is a tough one for anyone who is in the Oval Office. Maybe he was wrong on this, but to castigate him for this decision is saying that it was an easy choice and he chose poorly. That is not the truth.
It will come to that.