Not that everything isn't going great and everything in Iraq, but the pentagon needs a little more money to get the job done. About 70 billion more.

The Post:

The Bush administration intends to seek about $70 billion in emergency funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan early next year, pushing total war costs close to $225 billion since the invasion of Iraq early last year. [Weren't Bush's attack dogs just saying kerry was exaggerating the $200 billion number?]

The new numbers underscore that the war is going to be far more costly and intense, and last longer, than the administration first suggested.

The deferral of needed repairs over the past year has added to maintenance costs, which can no longer be delayed, a senior Pentagon official said.

Gross negligence.

Ayad Allawi, on Tuesday accused foreign troops in the country of "gross negligence" in the massacre of 49 Iraqi National Guard recruits over the weekend, an unusually critical remark by the U.S.-backed leader. [These are the guys we're turning over everything to after the election.]

In Washington, a former top occupation security official said more Iraqis were being trained for the country's security forces than the United States and its allies are capable of protecting.

"There are so many being trained now, U.S. forces can't watch them all now," said Peter Khalil, an Australian defense expert who was in Iraq from last summer until this spring as the director of national security policy for the Coalition Provisional Authority. "There are 40 battalions of the Iraqi National Guard, six or seven battalions of the Iraqi army. Recruits are coming in all the time. You don't have force levels to protect indigenous forces."

Meanwhile, an insurgent group, the Ansar al-Sunna Army, said Tuesday that it had kidnapped 11 Iraqi National Guardsmen, according to a statement posted on its Web site, the Reuters news agency reported.

"The mujaheddin in the army of Ansar al-Sunna captured a group of militia linked to the coalition forces that was out on patrol along the Baghdad-to-Hilla road," the group said in the statement. Hilla is about 60 miles south of Baghdad.

Brits on the march.

Tony Blair sucks a little harder on the pipe and sends 850 troops into the quagmire to protect our backside while we go clean up Fallujah. Last time we killed about 600 civilians and lost a ton of marines and came out of it with zilch.

Maybe, we ought to turn this one over to the Israelis.