Let me try to explain to Hitch, whom I usually admire, why it is said by "liberal" critics of the war that the American people have not been asked to sacrifice for the war effort. It's fairly simple: our shared treasury is a distant abstraction for most people, especially considering that in these days of Bushian tax cuts and deficits, there's no real money in it anyway. So Americans don't really see the war as costing them, personally, anything. (Maybe it will cost our grandkids something, but most of us aren't reflective enough to notice or care about that.)
Moreover, when our soldiers and civil servants, including Halliburton mercenaries, are killed doing their jobs over there, their families and friends suffer far more than we who have only lost fellow citizens. A universal draft would require quite a bit more sacrifice on the part of the American populace, and it would occasion more concern on the part of the populace for the soldiers taking their turns risking their lives. We would know more of them personally.
Finally, the volunteers in Iraq of whom Hitch thinks we should be proud are either private-industry mercenaries (who have not really brought a whole lot of credit to our nation) or, by and large, people who joined the Army hoping to learn how to use a computer on an engine of some kind and then to get a civilian job. Our service people are, on the whole, doing bravely what we have asked (and in "stop-loss" cases, shanghaied) them to do, and they deserve our respect and support. But I think that at this point the best kind of support and honor we could give them would involve pressuring the Iraqis to settle their medieval disagreements by threatening to pull our troopers out of the whole sordid mess by a "date certain."
