The contrast in U.S. troop levels assigned to Iraq and the Mexican border is striking. Currently, there are still 130,000 U.S. troops serving in Iraq, and most U.S. military analysts now concur that former U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki was correct when he warned before the start of the Iraq war in March 2003 that hundreds of thousands -- probably three to four times the current troop levels -- would be needed maintain security there, even if the Sunni Muslim insurgency had not broken out.

Yet Iraq is a nation the size of California with only 28 million people, about half that of California's. The U.S.-Mexican border stretches for thousands of miles across an entire continent and an estimated as many as three million illegal immigrants cross into the United States over it from Mexico every year.

That means that Bush was deploying one new National Guard soldier for every half-million illegal immigrants across that border per year.

The paucity of the White House's military response to what is certainly an extremely serious and accelerating erosion of law and order along the border and in the regions, especially in New Mexico and Arizona, immediately north of it, are revealing in many ways.

First, they demonstrate the extent to which the White House, the National Security Council and the Department of Defense still almost totally ignores the collapse of control over the U.S.-Mexican border as a serious strategic threat to national security.

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in fact do take border security very seriously from the point of view of trying to prevent terrorists from crossing it freely with men and potentially harmful materials.

However, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his phalanx of planners in the Pentagon, who were notoriously slow to take the scale of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq seriously, pay virtually no attention to demands on the already-strained military manpower and reserve system that border security may require in the coming years.

The disparity between the manpower resources deployed to Iraq and those sent to the Mexican border reflect this myopia. Even after Bush's headline-grabbing commitment, more than 20 times as many U.S. troops will remain committed to Iraq at any one time as are being sent to boost border patrols.

Second, these disparities in numbers confirm a lesson already learned the hard way in Iraq: Bush, Rumsfeld and their advisers keep their eyes fixed on the high-tech heavens and continue to pour scores of billions of dollars per year into the most ambitious and space-based systems imaginable, that may not work effectively for many years to come.

But they fail to grapple with the nuts and bolts realities: wars, military occupations, international peacekeeping and the most basic requirements of defending America's own land borders need long-term or permanent deployments of scores of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of reliable U.S. troops.

Third, the remorselessly escalating security requirements along the U.S. southern land border with Mexico underscore the degree to which administration policies have over-stressed and busted the limited manpower reserve system of the U.S. armed forces that was created after the Vietnam War.

This was also graphically demonstrated last summer in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when state official said the Louisiana National Guard was too stretched to respond as effectively as it might to the flooding of New Orleans because 65 percent of its forces were deployed in Iraq at the time.

Any serious commitment to beef up border security against illegal immigrants would require a far larger troop commitment, especially from state National Guard units, than the extremely small the one the president proposed this week. But committing 50,000- to 60,000 additional troops to border duty, as hard-line border security advocates have urged, is beyond the resources of the U.S. military system at the moment, given its commitments in Iraq.

However, the Bush administration has not shown the slightest sign that it is prepared to even contemplate a full U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq in the near future. On the contrary, any U.S. air strikes against the Iranian nuclear program could provoke a furious Iranian response across the Middle East that would rapidly require hundreds of thousands more U.S. troops being sent to military bases and threatened allies in the region.

The challenge of re-establishing effective U.S. government control over the American side of the border with Mexico is a Herculean one that will not be amenable to any quick fixes or band aid solutions. Sending 6,000 extra National Guard troops will be no more than a drop in the bucket. The problem looks certain to be bequeathed to Bush's successor in the Oval Office.

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