Iraq War: Reading to the end

Sometimes the most interesting item in a news article really is near the end:  U.S. sees no date for exit, aide says Senators skeptical Iraq security will improve with power transfer - Senators criticize Wolfowitz for lack of specifics on handover San Francisco Chronicle 05/19/04.

The article is about the slow return of life to Congress, as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz faced some tough questions from both Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Tuesday.

"My concern is, are we really leveling with the American people?'' asked Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio.

"It seems to me that we ought to talk about what's the future going to be, some rough estimates about the commitment that we're going to be making in terms of troops and the cost of it," he said.

I'm genuinely glad we're starting to see this kind of questioning.  I just wish that more members of Congress in both parties had been asking these kinds of questions before the invasion, when they might have forestalled a disaster.  Now, it's only a matter of managing how the disaster unfolds.

But the most interesting part was near the end, quoting a statement by Democratic Senator Joe Biden (my emphasis):

"There's no seriously trained Iraqi security force,'' Biden said, quoting Pentagon experts who he said had told him it would take three years to train 40,000 Iraqi soldiers, and three to five years to prepare the 79,000 Iraqi police needed.

This confirms that the Bush team still plans for an Iraqi army of 40 thousand soldiers.  Iraq's regular army under Saddam Hussein numbered about 400 thousand, ten times the level planned for the New Iraq.  That doesn't even count the substantial Republican Guard, the best-trained corps of Saddam's armed forces.

Surrounded by potentially hostile neighbors on all sides, no sovereign Iraqi government is going to be able to maintain an army of only 40,000.  The country can't be credibly defended with that number of troops.  And Biden is estimating it will take three years to train even those.

This tells me, for all the talk floating around about potential early exits and so forth, the Bush Administration plans to have the US be the military protector of Iraq, with substantial American forces in place on the ground, for the foreseeable future.  Even under the very best internal conditions.

One thing the Bush Administration is not planning to do is to leave an oil-rich prize like Iraq defended with an army of 40,000 Iraqi troops.  Just think of the juicy contracts Halliburton and Bechtel stand to lose.