Steve Clemons recently had Brent Scowcraft and Zbigniew Brzezinski discuss America's foreign policy (and I blogged on it at Politics Plus Stuff)

"Zbig's" headline, [was] his forthright prediction that nothing less than 500,000 troops, $200-billion a year, a new Draft, and "war taxation" would be required to "prevail' in the long run.

We are now talking about Viet Nam level commitments. In both Viet Nam and Iraq, these were the more realistic estimated troop levels required to win.

LBJ bought it, but did not dare call up the reserves for political reasons. Too many were still in the Reserves and Guard who had been called back for Korea and for the Berlin Crisis. So he expanded the draft and left the Reserves and Guard alone.

We all know how successful that was. But so do Bush and Quayle.

Before the Iraq war, General Shinseki told the Senate that it would require several hundred thousand troops after the war was over, and Wolfowitz said he was wrong.

Gen. Shinseki's estimate could not possibly be correct, because if it was, we couldn't afford to invade Iraq. It also contradicted the philosophy of the Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld, but that was less important than the fact that the DoD would never be able to convince Congress to support the Iraq war if Shinseki were correct. So Gen Shinseki was retired and replaced.

Now Zbig Brzezinski is confirming Shinseki's estimate.

More history. After Viet Nam the Congress reduced the size of the army and moved most of the support services to the reserves so that any effort to conduct a preemptive war like Viet Nam would require the use of Reserves. The idea was that this would make the effort so politically expensive that the Executive branch would not go into wars we really didn't need. [See LBJ above.]

Iraq has shown that this did not work, but GWB's Iraq war would have been politically impossible without his father's Persian Gulf War. It demonstrated that the Reserves and Guard COULD be called up without political repercussions. But Bush 41 was sufficiently politically astute to recognize that we still couldn't deal with a long-term useless war.

Now we have a war that has effectively destroyed our reserve Army system (Guard and Reserve) and left us with the choice of a draft or another cut-and-run as Nixon finally did.

We can put it off, but ultimately that is going to be the choice. Unfortunately, the Draft will merely be a way of delaying the cut-and-run option. We will not achieve the goals our government has for success in Iraq. The goals are too unrealistic, and the Iraqis won't let us.

Democracy? Well, democracy for Shiites - maybe. Never more than that. But few westerners will recognize what democracy for a tribal society really means. They should go look at Lebanon or Nigeria. Democracy in a tribal society means determinining the level of national power of each of the tribal leaders, little more. Until there is an industrial-economy-based middle class, democracy does not mean what Americans think it does.

The election January 30th is a chimera. The promise it seems to hold is not real. For Iraq (if they are lucky) it will result in a Shiite-controlled government which has a loose federation with the Kurds and a revolution (read civil war) with the Sunnis.

Our issues really come back to 1. how many casualties and how much treasure will we continue to throw into Iraq, and 2. how can we pull out of Iraq with the greatest benefit for ourselves and the Iraqis?

There is the cost-benefit ratio. Something conservatives claim to understand. I wonder how they will decide on it?