Never mind that Rep. Charlie Rangel wants to bring back the military draft for the wrong reasons. He still has a good idea.

The Manhattan Democrat and Korean War vet is on a lonely crusade to require military conscription. That he has close to zero support in public opinion and Congress means the issue will not get a fair hearing. That could be a fatal mistake. With Islamic terrorism growing around the globe, and with much of Europe throwing up its hands in exasperation and surrender, America needs to debate the size of our armed forces. Once again, the Free World may depend on us.

We now have about 200,000 troops in or near Iraq and Afghanistan, and our top commander in the region, Gen. John Abizaid, said increasing that total by even 20,000 would not be sustainable.

“When you look at the overall American force pool that’s available out there, the ability to sustain that commitment is simply not something that we have right now with the size of the Army and the Marine Corps,” Abizaid told the Senate recently.

Imagine that – we’re the world’s lone superpower. We have a population of 300 million, 60 million of whom are between the ages of 18 and 35. And we don’t have the forces to fight one and a half insurgent wars at the same time.

The war against Islamofascism, which I call World War III, is not easily won or ended. As of this past Sunday, we have been in Iraq longer than it took to win World War II. We don’t know what tomorrow will bring, so it is foolish to risk our future by having insufficient troops.

Rangel, unfortunately, doesn’t make his case for the draft on those terms. He wants to ditch the greatest all-volunteer Army ever assembled because he believes a draft will make war less likely. His reasoning is that if a president and Congress had children in uniform, we’d be a nation of pacifists. Speaking of Iraq, he wrote in an essay for the New York Daily News that “decision makers would never have supported the invasion if more of them had family members in line for deployment.”

That is a slander, but par for Rangel’s course. As he often does, he also plays the race card. He wrote that “the great majority” of soldiers in Iraq are poor, and cited New York City, where, he said, “70 percent of the volunteers were black or Hispanic.” That’s not a telling fact when you consider that nearly 80 percent of students in public schools are black or Hispanic and have been for nearly two decades.

But ultimately, the point of the draft is not only about who serves, but whether America has the military it needs to protect our country. With the Army struggling to meet its recruitment goal of 80,000 troops despite signing bonuses of nearly $40,000 and other benefits, we may have reached the limit of the volunteer Army.

And there is another advantage to the draft: It’s good for young people to serve their country. A Daily News editorial, which opposed the draft, still said Rangel “is on target when he posits that – at, say, age 18 – young citizens owe the country something, a democratizing sentiment if ever one was, a national call across all lines of race and creed and color.” The paper said that mandatory national service “warrants discussion.”

Indeed it does – and the draft should be part of it. Otherwise, there may come a time when our survival will depend on the tender mercies of people like Osama bin Laden.