The leftwing journalism side of the Wall Street Journal has a sob story today about the poor Army running out of money under the strain of expenses of combat operations in Iraq.

Would you just look at these examples?

It may seem hard to believe that a country which allocated $168 billion to the Army this year — more than twice the 2000 budget — can’t cover the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the two pillars of the Army, personnel and equipment — both built to wage high-tech, firepower-intensive wars — are under enormous stress:

The cost of basic equipment that soldiers carry into battle — helmets, rifles, body armor — has more than tripled to $25,000 from $7,000 in 1999.

The cost of a Humvee, with all the added armor, guns, electronic jammers and satellite-navigational systems, has grown seven-fold to about $225,000 a vehicle from $32,000 in 2001.

Those M4 carbines cost $1382 a piece! And before adding another $8800 worth of sights! Let’s drop those ugly suckers, and buy some nice new Ruger Mini-14 Ranch Rifles in the stainless steel synthetic stock configuration. We can get them retail for $600 a pop, and I bet if we buy a few hundred thousand we can probably get some kind of discount. These rifles shoot the same identical cartridge, and even come with useable sights.

True, they won’t each and every one have nearly nine thousand dollars worth of high-tech infrared shoot-them-in-the-dark sighting equipment, but we could probably get by well enough just purchasing that level of technology for a small number of snipers. Nobody had any of that kind of equipment in WWII and we still won.

If Ruger is not able to supply every Ranch Rifle we need tomorrow, we can just temporarily rough it with the same AK-47s we must have captured by the box car load from the Iraq Army, and which you can pick up cheap in any souk or bazaar in the Middle East. AK-47s are notoriously rugged and reliable.

$225,000 Humvees? It seems impossible to suppose that a large portion of the US Army could get by for basic vehicular transportation on lesser SUVs. How about some nice Ford Expeditions @$27,042 – $38,702. We can pull out all the stops, but the Eddie Bauer model with Convenience Package and power lift gate, add a terrific stereo and soup up the air conditioning, and still come out way ahead.

Looking at that picture of the contemporary soldier, tricked out with every high tech gee gaw anybody can think of. The thought inevitably comes to mind that we are not fighting technically advanced adversaries from Outer Space, or the German Army. We don’t have to achieve the absolute state of the art to be technically far ahead of our Islamic enemies. This conflict features us against people from the Middle Ages with guns. Kalashnikovs, RPGs, IEDs hooked up to washing machine timers are as high-tech as they get.

When you think about what the US Army is spending, we could probably just take out Mafia contracts on all our jihadi and insurgent adversaries on an individual basis, and still come out ahead.

And there is another obvious, and more realistic, alternative: just take all counter-insurgency operations away the Army (with its bloated and over-luxurious TO&E), and turn them over to the Marine Corps.

1:27 video

Jules Crittenden urges those chickendoves to enlist in time for the surrender and withdrawal.

The pressure for cut-and-walk is on. The moment of defeat is at hand!

Back when the war started, there were some highly principled peaceniks who decided to go to Iraq to shield the innocent Iraqi people from the onslaught of American imperialist war criminals. This effort, unfortunately, did not persist long enough for any of them to hear a shot fired. They left in indignant frustration when they realized Saddam Hussein was placing them in military installations.

This was too bad. I supported what they were doing. I thought if Sean Penn could save the lives of innocent Iraqis by bravely taking a round, that was good. I could have some respect for the legions of lefties, if they chose to get splattered in furtherance of their beliefs. But they didn’t. It was a great disappointment.

Since then, the anti-war crowd, most of whom didn’t even manage to not shield Iraqis in the first place, have channeled their indignation into demands that anyone who supports this war enlist and go to Iraq. They’ve also been incensed that anyone who didn’t go to a war that they didn’t go to 40 years ago should suggest the United States needs to act in its own self-interest and self-defense. They call these people “chickenhawks.”

Now, American soldiers may be asked to fight a rearguard action, dying for the disengagement the anti-war movement has demanded. Now is the time for everyone who supports this to enlist. Go to Baghdad. Place yourself between the hapless GIs and their attackers. Strap yourselves to the bumpers of Humvees … better yet, jog ahead of the convoy and jump up and down on anything that looks suspicious.

The loud chorus of Kumbaya that precedes any American military unit will alert anti-American terrorists that here are people who want to understand why they hate us. Surely this will cause these heartless killers to pause, and reconsider their ways.

I assume John “Last Man” Kerry and John “Cut-and-Run” Murtha — as doves who actually have heard shots fired in anger and engaged in the American imperialist war crime that was Vietnam, but have since repented — will be leading the Doves’ Crusade. I encourage all peaceniks to climb on board for the Big Lose. When your grandkids say, “What did you do when the United States of America was humiliated?” you don’t want to have to change the subject.

J.R. Dunn explains how leftist ideology delegitimizes American military effort and ensures defeat.

It began with Afghanistan, starting only a month after the attacks, and built up from there. Moore, the Dixie Chicks, Cindy Sheehan, Cynthia McKinney, Durbin, Murtha… The list could go on for page after page, all of them speaking in identical terms, all repeating the same code words – Halliburton, blood for oil, Abu Ghraib – all tearing into their country in a fashion unseen even in the Vietnam era.

And where the trendsetters have led, the public has followed. If the polls can be trusted (a bit of a leap, it’s true) something like over half the American people believe that the War on Terror, far from being a response to an unprovoked and atrocious attack, is a war of aggression fought on behalf on industrial capitalism in the form of George W’s oil buddies.

This is not a natural response. Countries fighting legitimate defensive wars don’t suffer this kind of erosion of public support in the midst of hostilities. Particularly as involves a war that began with an atrocity committed against fellow countrymen, an atrocity that could be (and eventually will be) repeated at any time. Such a reaction should not have occurred.

The reason it happened this time was the result of fifty years of conditioning that any and all American activities overseas, whether diplomatic, commercial, or military, are fundamentally illegitimate. American wars, no matter what their cause or nature, are viewed through the same prism, one created on the left for the purpose of undermining the country’s commitment to the Cold War, but useful in any context. Call it the “Imperial” or “Hegemonist” doctrine. Simply put, it holds that no American war (and little in the way of any interaction on the international level) is ever justified. All such ventures are wars of imperialist aggression, commonly carried out against helpless innocents in defiance of the wishes of the American people (at least the true American people – that is, left-wing Democrats), on behalf of secretive, sinister interest groups…

Unlike most left-wing doctrines, this one is not a European import but fully home-grown. It was incubated in the universities, developing over several decades in response to U.S. efforts against the Soviet Union.

Our fatal flaw involves our national will, our apparent inability to take on any necessary task, however lengthy, dirty or unpromising, and finish it satisfactorily. Our enemies have noted this and target it as a matter of course. Our friends – to perhaps stretch a term – have learned to manipulate it to their advantage.

As we have seen, this is no natural turn of events. There is nothing inevitable or unavoidable about it. It is entirely synthetic, the byproduct of an effort by our intellectual elite to serve an ideology now long dead. Our belief in ourselves as a nation, in our role and mission on the international stage, has been undermined for fifty years and more. There is not a level of society, from day laborer to corporate CEO, who has not been touched by this dogma. Not a single institution (with the professional military perhaps excepted) has been unaffected.

Says Mark Steyn in response to the piffle released today.

Isn’t the main problem with the Iraq Study Group that it’s just majorly lame? Almost anybody could crank out this kind of generalized boilerplate (“We were told by a general/a translator/my taxi driver/my Ukrainian hooker…”), and most of us could do it without a budget of gazillions of dollars and an Annie Leibovitz photo session.

Of course, Syria “should” do this and Iran “should” do that and, if they were Sandra Day O’Connor, I’m sure they would. But they’re not. And the only specific strategic proposal is a linkage between Iraq and a “renewed and sustained commitment” to a “comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace” — which concedes the same ludicrous rationale that the Saudi King Abdullah and all the rest of them make: that one tiny ten-mile sliver of Jews is the reason why millions of Muslims from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Emirates are mired in dictatorships, failed economies and jihadist fever. For the Baker group to endorse this clapped out pan-Arabism is disgusting. An “Arab-Israeli peace”? What does that mean? What exactly is Israel doing to Iraq, or Tunisia, or Qatar, or any other Arabs except those in the “Palestinian territories”? To frame it in those terms is to adopt the pathologies of the enemy. Shame on Baker, Hamilton and all the rest.

As for the insight on page 94 that so impressed Rich, yes, it’s true that the DIA and other analytical agencies don’t have a lot of strength in depth. But why is that? It’s certainly not because the US taxpayer isn’t showering them with dollars. It’s to do with a bureaucratic torpor that has proved almost totally resistant to any attempts to reform it since 9/11. And, while we may well “engage” with Syria and Iran to no effect, and US troops may well put their left foot in and take their right foot out, the one thing you can guarantee won’t be shaken all about is the torpid bureaucracy — of which this stillborn report is yet one more example.

An inspiring 7:37 video of American military & law enforcement personnel training Iraqi police recruits at JIPTC (Jordan International Police Training Centre). These people obviously do not believe that American efforts in Iraq are a “fiasco.”

Scrappleface has the right idea about where those troops should go:

Just days before the Iraq Study Group releases its top-secret report, President George Bush today ordered the Pentagon to preemptively redeploy U.S. troops from Iraq to “neutral neighboring countries including Iran and Syria.”

While retired Marine Colonel T. X. Hammes’ Sunday editorial in the Washington Post doesn’t really fulfill its title promise of telling us The Way to Win a Guerrilla War, it does identify precisely how we lose them, by describing how we lost in Vietnam, an experience we are unfortunately repeating at the present time.

While Mao was able to confront his opponent on the Chinese mainland, Ho Chi Minh and Giap had to defeat the French and the Americans without ever being able to threaten their home bases. They expanded on Mao’s concept by using the media and peace activists to convince the American people that we couldn’t win the war. They won not by defeating our armed forces but by breaking our political will.

The Times reports a leak from the James Baker-led Iraq Study Group. Predictably, a committtee made up of nearly-all-liberal has-been political hacks and trimmers (and mysteriously Alan Simpson) produced exactly what one would expect: a highly unspecific affirmation of the preferred policy of the chattering class establishment, i.e. withdrawal, cravenly couched so as to affix to the committee as little responsibility for any actual decision or result as possible.

The bipartisan Iraq Study Group reached a consensus on Wednesday on a final report that will call for a gradual pullback of the 15 American combat brigades now in Iraq but stop short of setting a firm timetable for their withdrawal, according to people familiar with the panel’s deliberations.

The report, unanimously approved by the 10-member panel, led by James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, is to be delivered to President Bush next week. It is a compromise between distinct paths that the group has debated since March, avoiding a specific timetable, which has been opposed by Mr. Bush, but making it clear that the American troop commitment should not be open-ended. The recommendations of the group, formed at the request of members of Congress, are nonbinding.

At the present time, as I watch one ambitious member after another of our policy establishment hold his finger in the air, conclude that the media and the domestic left has won, that the United States has been beaten by the Avenging Swords of the New Yorker and the Party of God of the Times, and that the time has come to scuttle over to the domestic camp of defeatism and make his personal obeisance in the direction of Michael Moore, I really wonder if it might not be possible to trade our entire corps of policy intellectuals to Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for some inferior quality herd of sheep.

Scrappleface leaks the real Pentagon document:

(2006-11-20) — According to a newly pre-released secret Pentagon document, the U.S. military is considering three options for dealing with the situation in Iraq, dubbed ‘Go Public, Go Home and Go Mecca.’

The unnamed Pentagon official in charge of leaking national security secrets to the Washington Post said it’s possible that the U.S. could adopt some combination of the three.

He summarized the strategy options as follows:

1. Go Public: Consistently leak top-secret Pentagon strategy deliberations to the news media as a way of neutralizing the unfair “element of surprise”, and of building trust by being more transparent with the enemy.

2. Go Home: Remove the only reason for terrorism by bringing all U.S. troops back home, and also allowing all U.S.-trained Iraqi troops to emigrate to the U.S.

3. Go Mecca: Deal “head on” with the heart of the conflict, by amending the U.S. Constitution to bring it into compliance with Islamic Sharia law.

Michael Fumento has photos from his most recent trip to Iraq.

Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.

Anticipating the conclusions of the report of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Survey Group, Daniel Henniger identifies the likely significance of that “new direction.”

after routing Saddam’s army in the south, President George H.W. Bush urged the Iraqi generals and people to “take matters into their own hands” against Saddam. Then on Feb. 27 came the White House order to Gen. Schwarzkopf to stand down and thus forgo the destruction of Saddam’s tank army. The Bush 41 team expected Saddam’s Baathist generals to finish him off and “stabilize” Iraq. That was realism. The secretary of state was Jim Baker and the deputy national security advisor to Brent Scowcroft was Robert Gates. Shortly, Saddam’s systematic, tank-led slaughter began of the Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north. In April, U.N. Resolution 688 said the attacks “threaten international peace and security in the region.” Mr. Gates acknowledged the miscalculation in the New Yorker last year.

The opinion of the American people matters, and this week’s election reflected fatigue with Iraq. We may be seeking a “way out,” but if the Iraq Survey Group proposes a solution with the merest whiff of selling out Iraq’s popularly elected Shiites, expect crudely realistic leaders in Russia, China, Nigeria, Venezuela, Bolivia, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere to conclude they too can downgrade, or obliterate, their own U.S.-oriented democratic groups. Then we can roll back the real end to notions of democratic possibility to the end of World War II. And with Democratic Party assent.