With a festering insurgency claiming the lives of more than 120 soldiers just this month, the Pentagon is set to request up to 30,000 more troops for the occupation. Senior Army leaders also said this week they will ask Congress for more money to make ends meet in Iraq and rebuild their drained force. Asking for these things is one thing; getting them is another; deploying them still another. Even if the order were cut right now, fresh divisions of troops would take months to get to overseas, meaning today's stretched force will have to put down the Iraqi revolt, restore security, and conduct the June 30 power handover without reinforcements. The U.S. military remains the most lethal fighting force ever fielded, but one year in Iraq has chewed it up, creating global shortages of manpower, equipment, and spare parts that are not easily relieved.

To a civilian, it may not make sense that a war involving 130,000 troops could strain the 1.4 million-strong U.S. military to its breaking point. Military officers often say that "amateurs study tactic -- professionals study logistics." The reason for this axiom is that even the simplest military task -- like moving a unit from point A to point B -- requires a Herculean logistical effort. ...

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A December 2003 study by the Army War College concluded that the war in Iraq had stretched the force to near its "breaking point." The cumulative effect of logistical problems, spare parts shortages, and unprepared reserves is that the Army will be significantly less ready to fight for the next several years. Should another threat appear on the horizon, these issues will make it exceedingly difficult for the Army to respond with anything close to the force it mustered to invade Iraq last year.

There is some irony in this. Heading into the 2000 election, then-candidate George W. Bush blasted the Clinton administration's 1990s deployments to places like Bosnia and Kosovo, saying they depleted our military's readiness. "Our military is low on parts, pay and morale. If called on by the commander in chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report, 'Not ready for duty, sir,' " said then-Gov. Bush, referring to the readiness of the 10th Mountain and 3rd Infantry divisions after their respective deployments to the Balkans. Today, the same criticism is being leveled at the Bush administration, except that Iraq is having a much worse effect on military readiness than the Balkans deployments ever did.

Remember, the military told the Bush administration that they required many more troops to invade, occupy, pacify and stabilize Iraq, but that was rejected by Rumsfeld, haboring fantasies about reduced need for military manpower, and the neo-cons, whose fantasies were apparently based on films about World War II, where American forces are welcomed as liberators with flowers and pretty girls. (Maybe they should have paid more attention to the reactions of the German people, as opposed to the French and the Dutch?)

We're clearly in a serious bind here, and the most Bush and Rove are going to do is to try and string things along, keeping the political damage as minimal as possible, until after the election. Then it'll either be Kerry's problem and out of their hands, or (in the horrific event that Bush retains his office), they'll use the situation in Iraq to make drastic systemic societal changes on the pretext of solving that problem, but the "solutions" will, no surprise, be tremendously beneficial to the people who put Bush in office in the first place.

Or am I being a tad too paranoid?