Some good questions.

1) Certain other nations should be damn grateful that we did the heavy lifting on this, and that we're just asking for "peacekeeping" forces. Still dangerous work, no argument there, but we were the ones who went in back when some were predicting we would lose 10,000 Americans in the process and be fighting full tilt for a year in the streets of Baghdad. I would rather see various nations put in troops and money on their own, instead of haviing to "filter" it through the U.N., but I'm not hard over on that.

2) Peace in Iraq will be expensive, and I don't think anyone had illusions about that. Of course, a lot depends on your point of view. For what the prescription drug benefit is going to cost (minimum) over just ten years, we could keep troops in Iraq at the current burn rate for 33 years. But nobody in the Democratic Party is even ruffled about that money. One would like to say it's because they consider the drug program more important, but it's more likely because nobody in Iraq votes in our elections.

I would also like to find out if the Iraq military costs being given are incremental or not. Anybody know?

I agree that we are stretching our capacity, but that's "Clinton's Military" for you. We have about 800,000 fewer active duty personnel in the military now than we had in 1987. At the end of the Gulf War we had 18 divisions. We now have 10. There is more here, although I hope things have improved since 1999.

Nobody had a clue what invading Iraq was going to cost. Nobody. We didn't know exactly what to expect and what was going to happen. Major combat operations could have stretched out much longer. The Iraqis could have destroyed oil wells and a lot more infrastructure. Civil war could have broken out. If chemical or biological weapons had been dispersed somewhere like Baghdad, what would the cleanup costs have been? While I like to poke the Left about all the dire predictions they made that were wrong, it is worth remembering that most of them had at least some level of plausibility before the war started.

Most intelligent people still would be reluctant to nail the costs down, even now.