Something isn't adding up. Bush is expected tonight to request an additional 20-30 thousand soldiers for Iraq. And to meet this goal there are going to be more callups of the reserves and extensions of current duty tours - which also seem to be made up in large part by reserve troops.

But if you check the reference sources, the US military is supposed to have about 1.4 million active duty personnel - today. If these competent and trained soldiers aren't available to be put to work on the largest military task at hand, where are they? What are they doing?

I for one question the logic of adding an arbitrary number of troops to a situation that is tenuous at best. But a larger question emerges. If we're adding 20-30 thousand weekend warriors to a staff comprised largely of weekend warriors, why not just put a half million active duty folks over there tomorrow and act like we mean business? That would still leave us close to a million folks to handle any other world crises which might demand attention. Surely we don't have any immediate crises requiring close to a million active duty personnel.

It makes me wonder if we really have 1.4 million active duty soldiers. Maybe we don't.... Which brings up the question - how many do we really have? Given the gyrations the military is going through to keep 150,000 or so in Iraq (our most demanding campaign at the moment), it leads me to believe that the total active force must in fact be somewhat less than 300,000 (50% on standby for immediate national defense); and nobody is talking about this because it might point out how badly the volunteer army has failed and how vulnerable we really are.  

It's a strange and peculiar media tyranny we live under. We've got hours to discuss the lame presidency of Gerald Ford - spread over a week or two. OK, the Vietnam War did end under his watch, 30 some odd years ago. So I won't dis the guy completely. And then we spend countless hours contemplating the demise of one James Brown, who wrote a few hit songs 30+ some odd years ago. Yawn.

But the man of the hour, the butcher of Baghdad - whom we've spent trillions of dollars to hunt down and capture, and whose country is even now sapping the lives of thousands of our youngest and brightest; gets less than 30 seconds on the evening news when his life passes in an execution filled with the same sectarian politics that is causing our soldiers untold grief.

Some will say that he doesn't deserve as much respect as Gerald Ford. I'm not going to argue that point, though I'm not convinced. I would argue that his life has more direct impact on the average American than James Brown, and the circumstances surrounding his death warrant more than a 30 second sound bite.

The world is now safe for the new Iraq. By this I do not mean democracy and a world free from terrorism. We didn't kill Saddam. Al-Sadr killed Saddam. We facilitated it.

Meet the new boss.