"As they stand up ..."

Post-election thought: For the past couple of years, we've been hearing from the Administration, in response to questions about when "the mission" in Iraq would be accomplished, that, "As the Iraqi army stands up, we'll stand down." Nice phrase, in this Tom-Friedman world when pretty much every public statement has to involve some sort of slogan-like utterance. And it sounds reasonable, in that we're supposedly just there to keep things together while the new government gets itself and its civil authority structure organized and in place.

I'll pass over these "buts" with just a mention of each:
1. There was a perfectly good Iraqi army there before we got there. At least, I never heard anything about Saddam Hussein needing to get tighter control of things.
2. The Iraqi government seems to have completely lost control. The entire society has pretty much fallen apart.
3. Our US forces don't seem to have much control over things. We read about our soldiers having to plan for hours to drive pretty much anywhere for some ordinary errand, and to have plenty of scouts, reinforcements, armor, etc. just to, in effect, go to the store.
4. Iraq's new US embassy will be the largest in the world; and our military bases there are numerous and increasingly permanent.
5. We've started to hear government spokesmen make comments, on the record, about having an unfriendly regime control all that oil ...

No, the most intriguing thing about this "We'll stand down" formulation as an explanation of what we are still doing in Iraq and how long we'll stay is this: We hear these past few months that the Iraqi army is coming along just fine, thank you, and will soon have 350,000 trained and functioning troops. Now think about that number. Why are we training 350,000 troops to "stand up" so that our 150,000 can "stand down?" Several comments are just begging to come out, so here they are:

1. General Shinseki said, before the war began, that it would take "several hundred thousand" US soldiers to control the country, and he was basically cashiered for saying so, because he was contradicting Mr. Rumsfeld.
2. Does the difference between our 150,000 troops and the 350,000 replacements mean that our 150,000 are, indeed, woefully inadequate to the task?
3. Is a "Coalition" soldier worth 2 1/3 Iraqi soldiers?
4. Why don't they "stand up?" What are they waiting for?

Iraq has two possible futures: collapse and ethnic warfare for five to fifteen years until the various regions are "cleansed" of infidel Sunnis or Shiites or Kurds; or the emergence of a "strongman" who will mobilize enough brute force to keep everything quiet. Although the second is what the country formerly had, of course, it is unlikely in my opinion that this can be re-established, although it would be much preferable from the point of view of saving human life and restoring some semblance of civil society. The segmenting of the country by regions will involve Iranian and Turkish, and possibly Saudi, intervention; and the US just won't be able to resist all those opportunities to sell arms and hire Halliburton and the rest of Corporate America --there will be just too much money to be made; so we will continue to be involved. Than means more dead Americans, and more billions. [Aside: it's funny that we don't heve the $40 billion per year it would cost to provide the same universal health care that every other Western country has; but the 3+ billion dollars we spend a week in Iraq is easy to find.

It's particularly sad that we have chosen to destroy our international standing, ruin our military, bankrupt our treasury, and kill so many scores of thousands of people in order to achieve this calamity. I think all we can do now, if we are very lucky, is try to restore our own republic, before Bush and "torture man" Gonzalez and the whole despicable crew finish it off.