This morning’s Christian Science Monitor offers very puzzling coverage of topic that presses on Americans – but not on their government. Gordon Lubold looks at withdrawing troops from Iraq.

WASHINGTON - Some in Congress and an increasing number of Americans want the Bush administration to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq, but even if the decision came tomorrow to remove all 160,000 troops now there, it could take as long as 18 months to do it, say former military officials who've managed troop exits before.

Sooner or later, American forces will leave Iraq. But that political decision cannot be made in isolation, but must take into account the logistics of departure, which will be neither simple nor speedy, say former military officers.

There’s a great deal of denial in Washington, as actually befits a small company town that is completely walled off from the actual country that is governed from there. To say that the exquisites of our governing elites have no concept of life in “the provinces” is not overstating the issue. Working in a company town becomes a self-reinforcing paradox. Poll after poll shows that the vast majority of Americans want to abandon an enterprise that more and more resembles nothing more than a money pit draining lives and finances away from what many perceive as more vital needs: protection of the nation and its citizenry.

Thus we find that while it was possible – quite easy in fact - to feed 160,000 troops into the quicksand pit in less than six months, it will take three times as long to extricate ourselves. And no one in the company town wants to see this fine example of foreign policy that enriches everyone within the company town fail. They feel compelled to magnify the dangers and difficulties of leaving.

Unlike other withdrawals from, say, Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War, insurgents, terrorists, and other bad actors are expected to contest US forces as they leave.

"There is no way they're going to pull out of that theater as fast as everyone thinks," says retired Army Lt. Gen. William "Gus" Pagonis, who oversaw the withdrawal of nearly half a million US troops and hundreds of thousands of pieces of equipment from Saudi Arabia in 1991 over a seven-month period.

That’s right – all those bad guys, who hate us for our freedoms, and want to kill us all, will bitterly resist our leaving. The last time I saw such a self-serving bit of nonsense dressed up as justification for savagery was when Richard Nixon decided to attack Cambodia because the North Vietnamese refused to fight the kind of war we wanted to fight.

Withdrawal means different things to different people. Depending on how the war goes over the next few months, the Bush administration could push for more time and then begin a gradual withdrawal next year. Democrats in Congress, so far unable to halt implementation of the administration's "surge" strategy in Iraq, may yet be able to force a faster removal of troops.

Most agree that a "residual force" of untold size is likely to remain in Iraq for some time.

Here are the facts: George Bu$h will not allow one soldier to be withdrawn while he occupies our Oval Office. Not one. In fact, he is going to insist on a larger presence in Iraq, and the Joint Chiefs will be ordered to make it happen. That means that the current 15 month deployments will become 18 months for the Army, and the just-increased 12 month deployments for the Marines will jump to 15 months. Twelve month down times at home will be shortened to nine months. Several thousand more sailors and airmen will be retrained as infantrymen, military policemen and convoy guards. By the time we finally get this man and his evil cohorts out of our government, whether in January 2009 or some undetermined time after that, we will have over 180,000 troops in Iraq.

In discussing something as momentous as undoing a tragically bad decision, it’s important to understand motivations. George Bu$h doesn’t want us to leave Iraq because that would imply he made (another) bad decision. Big Oil doesn’t want us to leave because – well, just look at the name. The military doesn’t want us to leave because the flag officers have got this idea about doubling down again and again until you prove your testicles are bigger than the other guy. The Republicans don’t want us to leave because they’re all making money at this. The Democrats just want the Republicans to stop beating them, and will agree to anything, if only people will treat them nicely.

It seems the only people who want us to leave are the poor and the middle class who actually pay the taxes that support this thing, and who supply the bodies that are bleeding and dying over there. The Iraqis also want us to leave. Overwhelmingly.

"It's possible, even likely, that Iran among others would try to humiliate us on the way out, so you'd have to plan for a fighting withdrawal," says Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star general and adviser to the Defense Department. If the Bush administration were to opt to leave most of the military's equipment and facilities in Iraq, forces could be removed in a little more than three months, he says. But it's more advisable for US forces to exit gradually over more than a year when the time comes, says Mr. McCaffrey, who does not support an American withdrawal now.

I can understand why GEN McCaffrey might be worried about being humiliated. I don’t understand why he doesn’t feel humiliated right now, though. The Army that everyone in the company town boasts is the “most powerful army in the world” is unable to enforce a four-year-old occupation, and no one feels humiliated by that fact?

The Bu$h malAdministration keeps claiming that the evil Iranians seek to dispossess us from our conquest, and take it over for themselves. The claim that they would harry and attack us as we withdraw makes no sense really, because if they were really interested in supplanting us the realistic scenario is that they would do everything in their power to facilitate our speedy and trouble-free exit.

We keep sending the same troops back to Iraq, again and again. We’re now at the point where we’re sending sailors and airmen and disabled soldiers back because we haven’t got the healthy troops we need. Each time we send these mentally and physically damaged soldiers back we make our Army weaker.

We could get enough troops by instituting a draft, but that would scare the upper and upper middle class. They would suddenly understand their children will be killed and maimed and suddenly the 72% that now want us out would grown to 92%.

We’re not going to fin a miraculous military victory because we’re fighting a nation that doesn’t want to be occupied. We can pretend we’re seeking a political solution to the violence for years but we won’t find it because we’re the outsiders – the occupiers.

Prime Minister Maliki’s carefully chosen government is failing. Its internal opponents are withdrawing from the government. Cabinet ministers are walking away from their portfolios, and his response is to say he won’t accept their withdrawal. Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous? Have you ever quit a job? Did your boss say he refused to accept your leaving? Did you laugh in his face and leave anyway?

Soon, sometime after the September report from GEN Petraeus that Americans have been manipulated to believe will magically sole all the paradoxes, the US will engineer a coup against PM Maliki and out another figurehead in there. It will be a desperate attempt to find someone – anyone – will enough political clout to convince the rest of the country to quiet down, stop resisting the occupation, and allow the US-written Oil Law to be enacted so as to legalize the theft of Iraq’s future. Then suddenly, Big Oil will have its wealth, the US will suddenly not be humiliated on the international stage, and everything will be wonderful again.

Such are the dreams in the company town known as Washington, where the cocktails are always doubles, the cocktail weenies are always warm and never greasy, and there must be something unusual in the water.