Just which countries, exactly, are helping in Iraq?

Each day brings fresh evidence that the Bush administration is planning to keep American soldiers in Iraq for a long time—lots of soldiers, for several years—and that it's doing stunningly little to get other countries, from our supposedly vast "coalition," to chip in.

The case goes well beyond today's testimony by Gen. Tommy Franks, the outgoing head of U.S. Central Command, who told the House Armed Services Committee, "I anticipate we'll be involved in Iraq in the future. Whether that means two years or four years, I don't know." This was an only slightly more specific variation on his testimony Wednesday, before the Senate committee, that our troops would be in Iraq "for the foreseeable future." (He made this open-ended remark at the same hearing where Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, after repeated questioning on the subject, that the monthly cost of our stay there has risen from $2 billion to $3.9 billion, not counting reconstruction.)

The median number of Franks' two to four years—three years—is how long Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith said last Monday it would take to train the New Iraqi Army's first 40,000 troops, or just over one-quarter the number of U.S. troops currently in Iraq.

Rumsfeld has recently suggested the commitment might be longer still. At a Pentagon press conference on June 30, he recalled America's own spate of violence in its period of early independence and noted that, following the failed Articles of Confederation, "it took eight years before the Founders finally adopted our Constitution and inaugurated our first President." He added, "That history is worth remembering as we consider the difficulties that the Afghans and Iraqis face."

If that is now the measuring gauge, eight years is probably a conservative estimate. Unlike Saddam and Osama, Benedict Arnold wasn't roaming the countryside after the Revolutionary War. Shay's Rebellion, which Rumsfeld cited as an example of America's post-colonial chaos, was put down by a well-established militia and judiciary, the likes of which don't remotely exist in today's Iraq.

A prolonged occupation has been in the game plan since at least June 13, when, according to the trade journal Inside the Army, the Pentagon signed a $200 million contract with Kellogg Brown & Root—a subsidiary of (guess what) the Halliburton Corp.—to build barracks for 100,000 troops in Iraq, or, as the contract puts it, "the set-up and operation of all housing and logistics to sustain task force personnel." (The journal is available online only by subscription, but a summary of the article can be found here.)

In a disturbing, if unwitting, bit of symbolism, these barracks—which Halliburton has also constructed in Kosovo and Bosnia—are known as "SEAhuts," an abbreviation for "South East Asia huts," since they are similar to the quarters that were built for U.S. troops in Vietnam. (In a move that indicates that Halliburton employs some image-savvy executives, the name has recently been changed to "SWAhuts," for South West Asia.)

Gen. Franks said at yesterday's hearing that 19 countries have forces in Iraq, with another 19 preparing to send some and 11 discussing the possibility. But nobody is telling just which 19—much less 38, or 49—countries Franks is talking about. Consider this Hellerian conversation I had today with a Pentagon public-affairs spokesman:

ME: How many countries have, or soon will have, forces on the ground in Iraq?
PENTAGON: There's a dozen nations now, a dozen more very shortly, and a dozen more considering it.
ME: How many people does this add up to?
PENTAGON: You'll have to talk with the individual countries about that.
ME: Which countries are they?
PENTAGON: We can't go into that.
ME: How can I talk with the countries if you won't tell me who they are?
PENTAGON: Well, Britain, of course. Poland has publicized its involvement. But, as I'm sure you understand, this is a very discreet subject for many of the others.

Let's ignore for the moment that the spokesman's three dozen nations amount to a baker's dozen fewer than Franks' 49. (They also differ from Feith's remark on Monday, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, that 18 foreign nations have "military capabilities on the ground in Iraq" and over 41 have "made offers of military support.")