Once again, senior military commanders have appeared on Capitol Hill, and testified that the number of troops we have poured into Iraq and Afghanistan has severely compromised the integrity of our fighting forces:

Senior Army and Marine Corps leaders said yesterday that the increase of more than 30,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan has put unsustainable levels of stress on U.S. ground forces and has put their readiness to fight other conflicts at the lowest level in years.

In a stark assessment a week before Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, is to testify on the war’s progress, Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army’s vice chief of staff, said that the heavy deployments are inflicting “incredible stress” on soldiers and families and that they pose “a significant risk” to the nation’s all-volunteer military.

“When the five-brigade surge went in . . . that took all the stroke out of the shock absorbers for the United States Army,” Cody testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee’s readiness panel.
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“I’ve never seen our lack of strategic depth be where it is today,” said Cody, who has been the senior Army official in charge of operations and readiness for the past six years and plans to retire this summer.
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Cody said that the Army no longer has fully ready combat brigades on standby should a threat or conflict occur.

The nation needs an airborne brigade, a heavy brigade and a Stryker brigade ready for “full-spectrum operations,” Cody said, “and we don’t have that today.”

Gen. Cody’s assessment is one in a long chain of stark, grim warnings to the Bush administration from the guys who are, you know, supposed to actually know about these things. The guys who we pay big bucks to know and understand, the guys who we appoint with great pomp and ceremony to these positions.

To George Bush and his blindly loyal minions, though, the likes of Gen. Cody are just so many generals going blah-blah-blah. They know in advance what the generals are going to say, they’ve heard it all before. They don’t even have to work any more to explain why, once again, such testimony will have no impact whatsoever on their Iraq policy (if that’s the right word). They can just trot out the same statements they made last time around, and recycle them word for word. Because, in fact, nothing has changed at all. All the actors are frozen in the same tableau, doomed to keep playing out the same scene over and over again. At least till January 2009 rolls around like the the kiss of a fairy princess, and releases everyone from the spell. (Or let’s hope that’s how this grim fairy tale will end.)