Drawdown in Iraq: background and present priorities

There’s an excellent piece in today’s NYT about the intense manpower crunch the US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have come up against, as more and more Reserve and National Guard troops reach the (fairly firm) 24-month cap on deployment that the Bush administration has reaffirmed more than once.
Obviously, softening this cap, like moving toward a draft, would be a very politically costly move for the Prez.
The article, by Eric Schmitt and David S. Cloud, quotes Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army commander who was dispatched to Iraq last month to assess the operation there, as saying:

By next fall, we’ll have expended our ability to use National Guard brigades as one of the principal forces… We’re reaching the bottom of the barrel.

By “next fall”, I take it he means fall 2005.
Obviously, it is this manpower crunch (and just possibly also a concern for the federal budget deficit??) that is driving the serious move inside the Pentagon toward formulating a plan for the radical drawdown of US troop numbers in Iraq. As revealed in the leaked British memo discussed here yesterday.
Here in the United States, we still have to see how the Bush administration is going to package this ‘radical deployment’ of US troops inside Iraq, so it might appear that the Prez is not currently lording it over a still unfolding, major strategic setback in that country.
(Though in truth, he is.)
My guess: they’re going to rush Jaafari and Co toward making some phony announcement about having reached agreement on a “Constitution” in mid-August, and then use that as the drawdown pretext. At this point, the folks in the Pentagon and White House probably care little about either the content of this “Constitution” or whether it even holds up for more than a few months– so long as it allows them to declare “victory”, and undertake their large-scale– but still notably incomplete— drawdown of forces…
The NYT piece notes, quite rightly, that the approaching train-wreck (ouch, sorry, probably a bad metaphor these days but I can’t think of a better one) of the arrival of so many scores of thousands of 24-month deployment caps is not news, but has been calmly and clearly predicted by military manpower-watchers for some time now:

There have been warning signs of the looming shortages. In the last several months, the chief of the Army Reserve, Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, has repeatedly cautioned that the Reserve was “rapidly degenerating into a ‘broken’ force.” General Helmly declined through a spokesman to comment for this article.

Certainly, the folks over at Today in Iraq have been tracking this issue closely for some time. I have tried to when I could. And on June 19, I took very seriously this report from the excellently informed NYT correspondent John F. Burns:

whether there are too many American soldiers or too few, a feeling is growing among senior officers in Baghdad and Washington that it is only a matter of time before the Pentagon sets a timetable of its own for withdrawal…
“I think the drawdown will occur next year, whether the Iraqi security forces are ready or not,” a senior Marine officer in Washington said last week. “Look for covering phrases like ‘We need to start letting the Iraqis stand on their own feet, and that isn’t going to happen until we start drawing down’. ”

Maybe other folks who comment on the situation on Iraq should also pay closer attention to solid matters of manpower availability and other aspects of logistics?
I’m thinking in particular of those two much-published and well-paid MSM commentators Tom Friedman and Ken Pollack…

On June 15, Tom was urging the administration to “double the American boots on the ground” in Iraq. And as recently as July 1, Ken Pollack of the Brookings Institution was also urging a major increase in US troops levels, in his lengthy screed in the NYT.
Well, the point of this post is not just to note how extremely bloviatory and idiotic the well-paid words of those two guys are. But also to prepare us all for the political battles ahead– at the point when the administration declares its political “victory” in Iraq and sets about implementing its plan for a regrouping/concentration of US forces inside Iraq.
At this point, I think, we in the peace movement need to:

(1) welcome the fact that the administration is starting to plan to bring some troops home and to recognize strategic realities on the ground in Iraq,
(2) point out that no drawdown that is only partial can serve the longterm interests of either the Iraqi or US citizenries, and that progress must swiftly be made toward a total US troop withdrawal from the country, and
(3) argue that– as an important part of the exit strategy– Washington should allocate substantial reconstruction funds to Iraqi firms, and reparation funds to communities and individuals harmed during the invasion and occupation.