"Half a league, half a league, half a league onward..."

Well, its not all about the denari, ya know.
left rev.

What does this mean?

President Bush said today that he plans to expand the size of the U.S. military to meet the challenges of a long-term global war against terrorists, a response to warnings that sustained deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the armed forces to near the breaking point.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Bush said he has instructed newly sworn-in Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to report back to him with a plan to increase ground forces. The president gave no estimates about how many troops may be added but indicated that he agreed with suggestions in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill that the current military is stretched too thin to cope with the demands placed on it.

"I'm inclined to believe that we do need to increase our troops -- the Army, the Marines," Bush said in the Oval Office session. "And I talked about this to Secretary Gates and he is going to spend some time talking to the folks in the building, come back with a recommendation to me about how to proceed forward on this idea."

Nothing, really, to do with Iraq, and everything to do with what Dwight Eisenhower warned us about: the military-industrial complex:

The Army has already temporarily increased its size from 482,000 active-duty soldiers in 2001 to 507,000 today and soon to 512,000. But the Army wants to make that 30,000-soldier increase permanent and then grow an additional 7,000 soldiers or more per year. The Army estimates that every 10,000 additional soldiers will cost about $1.2 billion a year.

That's where the approval comes in: more money in order to hire more mercenaries soldiers so we can engage in even more foreign adventures. The lesson we learn from Iraq? Not that we don't need to engage in futile attempts to impose our national will on other countries, or that we don't need a foreign expeditionary force (remember those days?), but that we need a still bigger army.

Because then the enemy can't decimate our army as fast as they've done this time.

So, it's not all about the denarii; except when it is. Maybe we should consider rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's.