Iraq working to secure borders

I was reading some headlines on the MNSTC-Iraq website which my good friend Tara happens to maintain. I thought this story was pretty interesting.

The resulting plan lays out border fort construction locations in Suly, Diyala, Wassit, Maysan, Basrah, Muthanna, Najaf, Anbar, and Ninewa provinces and directly supports the national elections by helping to stem the flow of anti-Iraqi forces, money and weapons into the country.

As far as I can tell, these seem to be mostly on the border with Iran. Hmmm, very interesting, no?

See the thing is, I was having a dicussion with another news-junkie ex-military friend of mine a few weeks back. We think that if GWB is re-elected, we'll be bombing Iran within a year.

"Ah, but we can barely deal with the numbers needed in Iraq," I hear the chorus. The biggest mistake, apparently, in our prosecution of the war in Iraq, wa not engouh troops. Iraq is still not really pacified, so how can we remove out troops to start a war on another front? Wouldn't that be insanity, or at the least, stupidity?

Consider however, that when we started our war with Iraq, we had some logistical problems with just getting our troops in place. Basically, the last-minute Turkish denial of our request to stage our troops through Turkey was a huge factor, as was the Saudi denial.

Well, none of that is a factor any longer. We have, and will continue to have for some time, a large military presence in Iraq. The troops are already there this time around. And Iran has at least two borders to worry about: Iraq and Afghanistan. Depending on how much Pakistan feels like helping out, there's another stretch of border. Iran has significant border mileage with 6 countries, and significantly, several US allies or otherwise US-influenced nations. Regardless of whether any given nation on those borders decides to help the US or not, the border must be guarded. That is a huge pool of manpower. Much of the unrest in Iraq right now is directly caused by Iranian interlopers, and fomented by the Iranian government. How much of those sources will dry up when the border gets hotter? In the meantime, the US has relatively secure bases to operate out of in Iraq, striking across the border in little day-jaunts; literally minutes by fighter jet. Is there any doubt that air superiority would be established in hours?

In the light of this strategic view, these border forts represent an escalation in tenseness between the US-Iraqi coalition and Iran.

Of course, the average Iranian will not welcome US occupiers and interlopers, messing around in the governance of their nations. Some probably will, there's quite a bit of unrest there too, and the mullahs are not so popular. But the major argument against the possibility that we could force change in Iran, the idea that we're already overstretched, may not be as valid as many think.