1115.org

After a long time, I put on my turban, wiped my crystal ball clean and communed with my undercover army of psychic flies-on-the-wall.

I don’t like what I came up with at all. You won’t either.

The newest factoid about the Iraq war, the one that is now trotted out in obligatory fashion as a given in every serious discussion of what lies ahead in Iraq, is that we have no choice but to start drawing down troops in April 2008. Because we don’t have enough troops to sustain the surge past then. Bush can posture all he wants, and Bush and Petraeus between them can play all the silly games they want about how they’re now willing to consider reducing troop levels in the not-too-near future, maybe. “Journalists” like WaPo’s Michael Abramowitz can aid and abet this narrative by appending headlines like “Bush Moves to Put Himself in a Position For Troop Drawdown” to puff-pieces to their heart’s content.

But we don’t have the troops. Having scraped the bottom of the barrel, having no more troops to magically summon, in April 2008 we’ll have to start drawing down troop levels in Iraq from the current record level of 168,000.

It was the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who set the ball rolling in his confirmation hearings:

Adm. Michael G. Mullen, President Bush’s nominee to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate panel yesterday that the war in Iraq is taking a heavy toll on the U.S. military, warning that American forces are “not unbreakable” and stressing the need to “plan for an eventual drawdown” of troops.

Appearing in a confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mullen, 60, acknowledged that the increase in U.S. forces cannot continue past April 2008 under the military’s current force structure.

Fred Kaplan analyzed the situation in Slate on August 29:

There are a few ways to remedy this shortfall, all of them impractical or infeasible. First, soldiers’ tours of duty in Iraq, which were recently extended from 12 months to 15 months, could be stretched further to 18 months. However, Gen. Richard Cody, the Army’s vice chief of staff, told me, during a recent interview for a separate story, that this idea is “off the table.” …

Gen. Cody said his personal preference is the “full mobilization” of the Reserves. A president does have the statutory authority to call up to a million reservists, including retirees, into active service for the duration of a war or an emergency. But this step hasn’t been taken since World War II, and for good reason: It would be a huge social disruption; and, unless a president persuades the population that it’s necessary—unless the war is almost universally seen as vital to the nation’s security—the call up would have politically explosive consequences as well. (Lyndon Johnson expanded the draft rather than fully mobilize the Reserves during the Vietnam War.) There is no sign that Bush is preparing the public for such a dramatic step now.

Another option would be to persuade other countries to send more troops, but those that aren’t long gone are in the process of leaving. Finally, there’s the draft, which just isn’t going to happen and, in any case, it would take well over a year to call up, train, equip, and deploy fresh brigades for combat.

The long and short of it is that by next spring some of the 20 U.S. combat brigades currently in Iraq—perhaps as many as a quarter to a half of them—will be pulling out, and nobody will replace them. This is a mathematical fact, quite apart from anything to do with the upcoming election or the war’s diminishing popularity.

Kaplan’s post is titled “Sorry, Mr. President, You’re All Out of Troops“. My flies-on-the-wall are going: “Sorry, Mr. Kaplan, he’s not.” He does have a magic lamp that he can rub to summon up a large number of new troops, without the kind of political repercussions that would result from such God-forbid choices as a full mobilization of reserves or a draft.

It might take “well over a year to call up, train, equip, and deploy fresh brigades for combat” if we resorted to the draft. But we already have a very large number of trained troops who have so far watched the Iraq war largely from the sidelines:

The U.S. Navy currently has over 340,000 personnel on active duty and nearly 128,000 in the Navy Reserve…

(The U.S. Air Force) as of September 30, 2006, had 334,200 personnel on active duty, 120,369 in the Selected and Individual Ready Reserves…

All these troops need is a little re-training — some of which, in Tony Snow’s immortal words, could even take place after we’ve shipped them over to Iraq — and just like magic we’ll be able to not only extend the surge, but even increase troop levels, if that is the secret wish that Bush and Petraeus harbor in their hearts.

So let’s not kid ourselves that we don’t have the troops. Unfortunately, we do.

Let’s not kid ourselves that Bush has to do any specific thing. He’ll do whatever the damn heck he wants. Or whatever Laura and Barney will let him get away with.