The whole idea that "more troops" are needed in Iraq is absurd on its face. They sell this idea in America as though our soldiers are being sent to patrol the streets like New York City cops policing Malcolm X Boulevard on foot -- spreading goodwill, talking to shopkeepers, collaring the occasional fare-jumper, and scaring off the odd stick-up kid by their very presence.

That's not at all the way it works in Iraq. For one thing, the majority of the troops in a place like Baghdad never leave the massive, seemingly Manhattan-size walled-in Forward Operating Bases (FOBs). Battle-hardened soldiers derisively describe Army personnel who live in the FOBs as "Fobbits" and it is roundly accepted in Iraq that Fobbits make up a clear majority of our deployed military men. For soldiers who actually have to go out and risk getting blown up in patrols, Fobbits are a vile contagion, like malarial mosquitoes -- amazingly numerous and deeply annoying. One soldier laughed when I asked if he thought we needed more guys in Iraq. "Not more troops, but fewer Fobbit-motherfuckers," he growled.

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As it is, a great many of the outside-the-wire activities are artificial, self-justifying exercises without any immediate hope of engaging armed antagonists -- "show of force" tours around certain neighborhoods, visits to Iraqi police stations, etc. The prophylactic value of these exercises seems minimal, and many soldiers privately grumbled to me that their main purpose seemed to be to give insurgents something to shoot at.

When I was in Iraq, commanders seemed to recognize this, and even units who did go out on patrols did so on an extremely limited basis, not more than one hour out of twenty-four or forty-eight. And even during that one hour, they never got out of their Humvees -- never even slowed down their Humvees. The rest of the time they spent on the FOBs, tending to their equipment, watching DVDs, chatting on the net with anxious girlfriends back home and getting bossed around by Fobbit captains and lieutenants.

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Then there is sectarian violence. I knew one soldier whose job involved escorting a morgue truck around Baghdad every morning. Each morning, his unit would drive around and pick up the covert assassination victims who had been tortured, mutilated and left on the street overnight. They'd toss the bodies in the truck, then unload the bodies at the morgue later. Later that night, while the vast majority of American soldiers slept on FOBs or in police stations, the rival Sunni and Shia gangs would sneak back and forth across town and leave more bodies for the soldier's unit to find the next day. There are no American soldiers in between the gangs and their victims. We come in at the end, when it's too late.

The soldiers have all been trained to fight and they want to help, want to make a difference -- but there's no offensive mission for them. So what they spend most of their time doing is working to sustain their own presence. More than one soldier commented to me that the mission seemed mainly to be to keep the FOBs running.

I wasn't in Iraq very long, and I wouldn't presume to say that I know everything or even very much about how the war is being conducted. I'm just bringing this up because this whole debate about troop levels is being conducted under a number of assumptions that I'm not sure aren't absurd fictions. The argument for more troops assumes that the troops we have there already are actively engaged in making Iraq secure, only there aren't enough of them.

What I saw was that our troops were mostly engaged in keeping themselves secure -- and even that was a very tough job. The Iraq war has gone so wrong that it is no longer an occupation, no longer even a security mission. It's just a huge mass of isolated soldiers running in place in a walled-off FOB archipelago, trying not to get shot or blown up and occasionally firing back at an enemy over the wall they can't see. It's lunacy. Adding more guys to it just means more lunacy. But our government has a high tolerance for that sort of thing, and I wouldn't bet on it ending anytime soon.