Came across this early this morning, on the MSN home page, and had a "Stan-from-South-Park-pinch-the-bridge-of-the-nose" moment...

Who's in the Army Now? - Why we can't send more troops to Iraq-By Fred Kaplan

This "military analysis" plays off of the fears of the draft, sings the old "Bush's world domination" song - all the usual goodies.

Among the gems here, Kaplan says:

"As we're often told, 1 million men and women serve in the U.S. Army. So, why is it such a strain to keep a mere 150,000 in Iraq? What are the other 850,000 doing? Why can't some of them be sent there, too? And if they really can't be spared from their current tasks, what broader inferences can be drawn about America's military policy? Should we bring back the draft to provide more boots on the ground—or, alternatively, scale back our global ambitions so fewer boots will be needed?"

"Soldiers could be given less training and be allowed less time at their home bases. But the chiefs know that if they did that, they would soon have a disgruntled, ill-prepared Army—and a smaller Army, too, since such strains would torpedo recruitment and re-enlistment rates, which even now are falling well below target. (Soldiers and civilians might feel differently if the war in Iraq were truly a war of national survival or a titanic struggle of civilizations. During World War II, after all, millions were perfunctorily trained before shipping out to Europe or the Pacific, and they stayed there for years until the fighting was over. But the stakes of the present war are far less momentous.)"

If you think that the stakes aren't high in Iraq and Afghanistan, you're kidding yourself. Of course, even the most liberal of liberals usually stay far away from the subject of Afghanistan. You see, it's ok if we go after people AFTER they fly civilian airliners into buildings filled with thousands of people (well, sort of, anyway). It's not ok if we deal with people BEFORE they attack. Oh, wait...over a decade of defying UN sanctions, and frequent - sometimes daily - shots at aircraft in the no-fly zone...doesn't that qualify?

The stakes in the present war are the freedom of a nation, and the message that the terrorists can't win. To back out of Iraq now would be disastrous, both for the Iraqis and for us. (And, by the by, one of Osama's many convoluted criticisms of us is that we stranded Afghanistan by not helping them against the Soviets...). To leave a fledgling democracy, with a still-new military, would have very grim, and predictable, consequences. We have a responsibility to see this one through. To minimize the importance of Iraq is ludicrous. The stakes in both current major engagements are very high. Saddam tortured and killed a whole lot of people, but apparently not enough. He paid reward money to the families of terrorists who blew themselves up, but he didn't actually blow anything up. His weapons shot at our planes all the time, but since they didn't manage to do too well, it apparently doesn't count.

Talking about military restructuring, Kaplan says (among other things),
"In short, it's a smart gap-filler, but little more. It won't allow George W. Bush to send more troops to Iraq or Afghanistan, much less to other countries that he might like to liberate."

"They can't clone or borrow soldiers to float an imperial army."

I don't have the requisite military experience, or the kind of comprehensive military knowledge, to be able to respond to all of his particular comments about the percentages of active versus National Guard / Reserve troops. Admittedly, there are some issues with the current military structure (and eight years with a president who did nothing to enhance the military didn't help - a discussion for another time). But it's clear to me that Mr. Kaplan and critics like him aren't doing anything that qualifies as a "military analysis." It's more Bush-bashing, and gloom-and-doom military criticism. It sounds, from reading this, as if we're losing in Iraq. Same song, yet again. It's clear that this is analysis with an agenda; a way to get in a few shots at the present administration under the guise of studied opinion. And of course, if we were sending more troops there, if we did have a larger active force deploying, that would be wrong too. Then we'd be back to the "quagmire."

I'm left with the feeling that if Mr. Kaplan was analyzing a menu change at the Pentagon cafeteria, it would still have something to do with George Bush wanting to rule the world.