Bush's Dangerous Game

President Bush is playing a very dangerous game.

In Iraq? You bet. Against Iran? Certainly. But it's even more dangerous -- potentially much more dangerous -- than that, and I can guarantee you that if it were a Democratic president doing what George W. Bush has been doing, the game would be a front-page story nearly every day. Republicans would make sure of that.

Their hair, and soon that of the electorate's, would be on fire. Because Mr. Bush has left the United States essentially defenseless.

One reads in the major press of an increasingly dire situation, but mostly as background. Yesterday, for instance, the lede was that Bush "will cut Army combat tours in Iraq from 15 months to 12 months, returning rotations to where they were before last year's troop buildup...." That was the big story -- the one revolving around the troops themselves and the physical and emotional price they're paying for these unconscionably long tours.

As proper as that journalistic focus may be, it was nevertheless the underplayed remainder of the above sentence that, in the long run -- and for future historians -- could prove to be the ultimate undoing of America: " ... in an effort to alleviate the tremendous stress on the military."

The red lights are flashing, the Joint Chiefs are frantic (which, admittedly, they always are) and national security experts -- both inside and out of the administration -- are on the edge of a tormented breakdown because "more broadly," as the press coverage continued, "the U.S. military's ability to confront unanticipated threats" is pretty much, in a word, kaput.

This week, once again, a top Pentagon official (on his way out of office, of course) has told Congress "that the Army is 'out of balance' and that the current demand for forces in Iraq and Afghanistan 'exceeds the sustainable supply.' He added that 'soldiers, families, support systems and equipment are stretched and stressed.'"

In short, Bush has dumped all our might into one geopolitical basket, leaving the United States wholly exposed and virtually defenseless everywhere else.

Again, if a Democratic president had done what Bush has done, Republicans would dare call it treason. In fact, they once did.

In 1950, not long after Harry Truman's secretary of state in a "colossal gaffe" oddly omitted South Korea from the U.S.'s protective umbrella in a major foreign policy speech, all hell broke lose. Americans have now forgotten, but as the late David Halberstam, author of The Best and the Brightest, reminds us in his absolutely magnificent The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, this was the American military's state of readiness as one of those "unanticipated threats" materialized:

The United States would go to war totally unprepared.... The mighty army that had stood victorious in two great theatres of war, Europe and Asia, just five years earlier was a mere shell of itself. Militarily, America was a country trying to get by on the cheap, and in Korea it showed immediately.

The Army of this immensely prosperous country ... was threadbare. It had been on such short rations ... that artillery units had not been able to practice adequately because there was no ammo; armored groups had done a kind of faux training because they lacked gas for real maneuvers; and troops at famed bases like Fort Lewis were being told to use only two sheets of toilet paper each time they visited the latrine. There were so few spare parts for vehicles that some enlisted men [with their own money] went out and bought war surplus equipment. If there was any upgrade in weaponry, it was almost exclusively in the planes and weapons being designed for the Air Force, not in the weapons employed by infantrymen.

Remind you of anything?

The Korean War erupted from one of those Rumsfeldian known unknowns; an unanticipated threat that perhaps we should have anticipated but had little choice in engaging when it came about. And when it did we were caught with our pants down -- "totally unprepared," the Army "a mere shell of itself." And its sadsack condition, combined with almost unbelievably incompetent military leadership in the beginning, converted what could have been a swift police action into a bloody, multiyear international conflict.

For tens of thousands of Americans killed and wounded in the Korean War, it was, of course, the worst thing that could have happened. For Republicans, politically speaking, it was the best. They had a field day denouncing the unpreparedness of the Truman administration and soon tied that into Harry's responsibility for "losing China."

The Korean War era was the beginning of Republican domination on national security issues, which eventually would drive two consequently skittish Democratic administrations into the needless tragedy of Vietnam.

Now, somewhere another Korea -- perhaps Korea itself -- could be in the making. We do, after all, have vital security interests that lie outside of Baghdad and apart from the Iraq-Iran border. But to watch the Bush administration recklessly bankrupt our military resources in one region alone, and to listen only to Democratic reaction in its strangely muted way, one would hardly know it.

For an administration that now fashions itself as a hardass convert to Realpolitick, it is playing a very risky and dangerous game. It is betting that a historically hostile world will somehow remain civil and thereby let the U.S. off its self-inflicted unprepared hook -- at least until January, 2009. This is one bet I hope it wins, but history does tend to corrupt the odds.