You cannot get a full 15 minutes in the spotlight with a list, but you can get a nanosecond or two. Ten best, 10 worst, 100 biggest, 50 lousiest and so forth. Thus Foreign Policy magazine got the briefest of flashes when it brought forth its ranking of the world’s failed states.

Sadly enough for the U.S., our protégé nation, Iraq, was just barely beaten out by Sudan as the most failed state. The score was 113.7 for Sudan to 111.4 for our gang in Baghdad. Please do not give up hope. At the rate things are going, by next year Iraq should have displaced Sudan as the most failed state in the world.

To determine degrees of state failure, nations are ranked on a 1-to-10 scale in a number of categories. Iraq, you will be pleased to know, outscored Sudan in “human flight,” even though the African country has Darfur going for it. Iraq was also the worst in “security apparatus” and “economy,” but only tied in “group grievances.” It was a winner in “external intervention,” if only by a tenth of a point.

Hey, we’ll take it. After all, we are the external intervention in question, along with a few token military delegations from nations trying to get on our good side and many thousands of hirelings under the command of 21st-century corporate condottieri.

When it comes to discussion about the “external intervention” in Iraq, the talk is mostly about what we are doing to Iraq and less about what Iraq has done to us. Our forces are now well into their fifth year there, and in the opinion of some men who are qualified to make the judgment, our Army is disintegrating.

From the start, it was mal-equipped and ill-trained to suppress a complicated insurgency. Having almost no Arabic speakers, the Army has had to rely on local interpreters, who have been killed by their co-nationalists in large if unknown numbers. Other “terps,” as they are called, have been forced to flee.

In addition to the more than 3,500 of our people killed by largely unseen enemies, more than 34,000 have been wounded and injured seriously enough to require air evacuation. In this war, thanks to the high quality of our trauma medicine, many who might have died in Vietnam are alive and suffering horribly in military hospitals here.

Unlike previous wars, there is no respite for those fighting it. There is no safe rear area to rotate into for a few quiet and unworried hours of rest and repair of nerves. No place is safe in that country for our people.

Given the ever-lengthening tours of combat duty there, it is sad but hardly surprising that 111 of our people have killed themselves. In that connection we can see what the recent hullabaloo over military mental-health services is about.

Our Army, which we now all know was and is too small for the campaign assigned to it, has to suck people out of the Navy and the Air Force to fill up the holes, and that is not enough. The stopgap measures there cannot make up for the increasing difficulty the Army has in keeping its people and recruiting new personnel.

Retired Lt. General Robert G. Gard Jr. observes that half of the West Point class of 2002 has left the service at the earliest date they were legally free of their obligation to stay in the Army. Meanwhile, to bolster the ranks, people with minor criminal records are also being accepted. A hundred years ago it was not unusual for judges to give unruly young men the choice of six months in the county jail or joining the Army, but that was a different Army from today’s organization, which still demands stamina and strength but also the capacity to operate complicated machinery.

The Washington Post noted that to make up for the inadequate numbers of troops and their less than ideal level of training and physical strength, the private-security industry is being given wider and more crucial military responsibilities. “The security industry’s enormous growth has been facilitated by the U.S. military, which uses the 20,000 to 30,000 contractors to offset chronic troop shortages …. The Army has … tested a plan to use private security on military convoys for the first time, a shift that would significantly increase the presence of armed contractors on Iraq’s dangerous roads.”

We know too little about the contractors. We are not sure how many have been killed while on the job. We do know that many, if not almost all of them, are not Americans. We know a lot are Kurds, who may well have their own ideas about how things should turn out and are, thanks to their employment, armed and ready.

We do not know if they can be counted on in certain situations, but we do know, given that they are hauling all the supplies, the ammo, the food and fuel the Army must have, that if the contractors were to take leave our expeditionary force would be in dire straits.

Given the condition of our forces, some of the plans being proposed in Washington seem not only unrealistic but dangerous. Democrats and Republicans both are coming up with plans to take some of the Army out and leave the rest as trainers or whatnot. That may be a recipe for getting those left behind massacred.

Yet everybody in Washington takes it for granted that the United States is going to occupy its fortress of an embassy just nearing completion. What they do not tell us is by whom and how the place is to be defended. Can they possibly be thinking that they are going to leave that job to a bunch of hired Kurds?

It is a bitter irony that it has been under the Republicans, the strong defense party, that our Army has been brought close to ruin. In that regard, few Democratic voices are heard discussing how to put our Army back together again.

It could be that the politicians think that “technology” has ended the need for an American Army. Maybe they believe the country can be defended by robots and hired Rumanians. Even so, it has been the tradition for a big, non-failed nation such as ours to have an Army. Without one, the Fourth of July will not be the same.