Who's counting?

Ya know, with Rummie's recent announcement of a withdrawal of some troops from Iraq, I got to thinking. We'll have about 140,000 soldiers there afterward (if you believe the Pentagon), and I got to thinking. Does that count the sailors on board ships in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf? What about the soldiers stationed in Kuwait and Qatar and other nearby sites? And what about this: Now that we're using thousands of "private contractors" to perform services that our military used to do--KP, transport, security operations--our soldiers are freed to perform truly military duties, right? Unlike Vietnam, where our 550,000 troops (at the height of the war) were doing all such things.

It's possible, by such reckoning, that our total military commitment to the outrageous, illegal war is comparable to the outrageous illegal war in Vietnam, only, so far, not quite as long.