......I don't disagree that Iraq has eroded the military's ability to take on other potential threats.  However I have a different and more radical opinion about the necessity of the necessary size of our standing army and the geographic placement of those forces in peacetime.  My general opinion is that we can mount effective response to emerging threats while maintaining a much smaller, leaner, less costly standing army than we have now, and that furthermore, the placement of our forces around the globe so that they are near where the likely threats will come is unnecessary and a waste of money in most instances.

My thought is based in my belief that success in any military engagement has much more to do with strong leadership and certainty of purpose in the mission, and not military might based on troop numbers and hardware.  In other words, if most people see the military engagement as righteous, and the leaders are competent, the effort will succeed.  People make a big deal about training forces, but really, a large army can be created out of a motivated populace in a relatively short period of time, as needed.  (Witness the fact that it was even possible to train an unmotivated shiftless no-account brat like George Bush as a fighter pilot while an unpopular war was ongoing.) 

Part of the problem we are having in Iraq is not so much the size of our total army in 2003-- we had plenty of troops-- but instead that the American people were not mobilized for the mission, so that even with a large military at the beginning of the mission, we are now facing troop shortfalls in Iraq.  My idea would be to automatically trigger a draft for any military mission over a certain size-- anything much larger than the Afghanistan mission, and the draft notices would be in the mail.  Our political leadership would be a lot more selective in choosing ambitious missions like Iraq if such a move automatically triggered a draft-- drafts would tend to cause the public to scrutinize our government's justification for war a little more closely than they sometimes have in the past.

One other problem with Iraq was that our troops were "committed" elsewhere around the globe at the start of the war.  To me, this is largely a problem of perception-- the perception that removing troops stationed abroad is somehow "abandoning" the region.  In Korea, for instance, it is not the presence of any certain number of troops in South Korea that is the deterrent to any dreams of invasion by the North Korean regime; it is, instead, our strong alliance with South Korea and our expressed and implied common interests in the defense of South Korea.  If we removed our troops from South Korea tomorrow, would this mean that we had abandoned our commitment to aid our ally against an aggressor?  Of course not.  But some fools on all sides would perceive it that way, and that's why permanently stationing troops aborad is a particulary sticky trap for any nation.  We need to extricate ourselves from that trap by drawing down our troops at these overseas bases.

Huge standing armies and gee-whiz hardware have diminishing returns even in cases where it's advantageous to have a large, fully trained force immediately at hand.  This is especially true here in the United States, where our sheer technical military might is mostly wasted because our human rights ethic prevents us from using that technical might to its fullest effect anyway (at least most of the time, post Hiroshima/Nagasaki).  Additionally, large standing armies get soft and complacent while waiting for the big war.  Expensive equipment corrodes or becomes obsolete-- hundreds of billions of dollars is wasted on military equipment that will never see combat. The best leadership gets diluted in the huge standing army.

So I don't agree with the general frame of your argument.  I would much rather that we complete our commitment in Iraq and then reexamine our bloated military and misguided and ineffective defense policies, rather than hastily withdraw from Iraq in the name of having our same old policy of having a huge standing army standing at parade rest around the world at huge and unsustainable cost and with little benefit to our national defense or the defense of our allies and interests around the world.