This Old Lily Pad
This is my Uncle Frank.

Pretty nice place he's got there, but he's always complaining when anyone comes to visit. "Close the door!", he'll yell. "You're letting in a draft!" That's when you know Uncle Frank isn't taking his meds.
But there's another draft I wanted to talk about, and it's the one that this guy is opening the door for.
Tragically, born without lips.
This is Army Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, President Bush's "Iraq war czar" (third cousin of the Romanovs and possible heir to the Russian throne), who has apparently been assigned the task of getting people used to the idea of reinstituting a military draft in the US, saying it "has always been an option on the table", though he wouldn't specify where the table was, or why no-one has been allowed to see it for the past 34 years.
Now, given that the US armed forces have been mostly able to meet their monthly volunteer quotas by, say, lowering the requirements to include coma victims, or promising new recruits "Lindsay Lohan naked in a bathtub full of warm vanilla pudding...plus, y'know, she's loaded" (actual quote), why take the politically risky step of talking about a new draft? One word: Iran.
Popular Persian postcard
We've been hearing a lot lately about Iran's little foibles, like supplying weapons to Shiite soldiers in Iraq, trying to guess the super-secret password to the Nuclear Clubhouse, and using Sharia as an excuse to see how many blasphemers they can hang from the same tree (8 is their top so far, and they still can't get in the Book of World Records!). So a swat on the nose and a stern: "Bad Islamic Republic! Bad!" certainly seems in order. But could there be more going on here?
Yes, once again, oil seems to be rearing its gooey head. See, Iran presents the same kind of conundrum that Iraq and Libya did back at the turn of the millenium. They were very, very naughty, so the other, good countries punished them with sanctions. One problem, though: that meant that the big oil companies, and their buddies like Bechtel and Halliburton, couldn't get a share of the oil in the sanctioned countries. That changed PDQ with the invasion of Iraq, which quickly led to the reversal of Public Law 80, and a few months later Moammar Gadhafi saw the writing on the noose, renounced terrorism, and opened his oil fields to development by foreign companies. The US quickly lifted its sanctions, and within minutes Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson was hoisting a cold one in Moammar's jacuzzi.
Forget Lockerbie. Deepak Chopra told me to focus on the present!
So imagine the dismay of Exxon & friends when they found out that China is buying up Iran's oil fields. China, of course, has its own needs: it had no private cars at all in 1983, now has over 30 million, and will have 100 million in another 8 years. Clearly, when you have to fuel 1.3 billion trips to the store every day, you need plenty of gas. But given that there won't be enough oil for everybody starting in about 4 years, it may be time to cancel China's take-out order.
But how to do it? Persia's Pesky President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, can't seem to stop writing long letters to George Bush long enough to hug a kitten or do much of anything that would justify lifting the sanctions, and even if they were lifted, it doesn't seem very likely that he'd be willing to give up all that Quranic nonsense about usury and so on and join the Multinational Conglomerate Crisco Party. So what to do? An invasion would solve everything, but the US has all its current soldiers, National Guard members, and Blackwater subcontractors tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan. George Bush himself would volunteer, but he's busy searching for bin Laden at his ranch in Crawford.
He's in there somewhere, dammit!
Well, the US is just gonna need some new recruits. Luckily, all American males between the ages of 18 and 25 are already registered with the Selective Service System, so all they'd have to do is flip the switch to turn on the lights. And heck, it's not like the GOP is going to win in 2008 anyway, so what's the harm?
Brrr. I think we'd better listen to Uncle Frank. Close the door before that draft comes in...