About that national security thing - oops!

In case you had any doubts, this would surely indicate staying in Iraq is not making us safer. It's only put us in more danger. Forgive the long quote.

Four years after the invasion of Iraq, the high and growing demand for U.S. troops there and in Afghanistan has left ground forces in the United States short of the training, personnel and equipment that would be vital to fight a major ground conflict elsewhere, senior U.S. military and government officials acknowledge.

More troubling, the officials say, is that it will take years for the Army and Marine Corps to recover from what some officials privately have called a "death spiral," in which the ever more rapid pace of war-zone rotations has consumed 40 percent of their total gear, wearied troops and left no time to train to fight anything other than the insurgencies now at hand.

The risk to the nation is serious and deepening, senior officers warn, because the U.S. military now lacks a large strategic reserve of ground troops ready to respond quickly and decisively to potential foreign crises, whether the internal collapse of Pakistan, a conflict with Iran or an outbreak of war on the Korean Peninsula. Air and naval power can only go so far in compensating for infantry, artillery and other land forces, they said. An immediate concern is that critical Army overseas equipment stocks for use in another conflict have been depleted by the recent troop increases in Iraq, they said.

"We have a strategy right now that is outstripping the means to execute it," Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.

I have been saying this since the flypaper slogan was popular White House rhetoric. If a real threat springs up, either here or abroad -- we're screwed. The bulk of our available assets are in Iraq. Our National Guard is so depleted it tooks days instead of hours to deploy assistance for Katrina. In fact it took weeks instead of days for them to render effective assistance. Think about what that would mean if a handful of terrorists blew up an oil refinery in Philly. Yet in the last five years since 9/11, the day that changed everything, Bush has done nothing about securing these facilities.

It boggles the mind that anyone could still suggest this man should be trusted with decision about national security, much less foreign policy. Not that it stopped Christopher Hitchens from trying.