While watching the latest edition of The McLaughlin Report on PBS program host John McLaughlin, after listing on the screen the cumulative economic and personal toll of the Iraq War, then provided interesting footage of a conversation involving two American troops stationed in Baghdad.

To say that these individuals were not "happy campers" would be a classic understatement.  The first soldier, a corporal, complained about the unrealistic scheduling, and how it was impossible to obtain sufficient rest before going out on the next patrol.

At that point the African American soldier with whom the corporal was communicating made his feelings crystal clear.  He tersely stated his willingness to make a compromise agreement extending his service, which he clearly despised.

The African American soldier declared that he would extend his Iraq service by 15 months at no additional pay if one condition could be met.  The condition involved George W. Bush riding along with him on patrol for that entire period.

For that matter what are the job prospects for any of us? A soft economic recovery and an increasingly level (or "flat," to borrow Thomas Friedman's  strange phrasing) global marketplace are rapidly reducing the options of American workers across a range of careers and vocations.  Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post asks "Will Your Job Survive?" Meyerson's alarm bells were tripped by a disturbing report from Princeton University economist Alan Blinder. I hate to go all "Lou Dobbs." But Blinder's prognostication about the job market of the not too distant future should send a chill down the spine of any American concerned about the future of the US economy.

In the new global order, Blinder writes, not just manufacturing jobs but a large number of service jobs will be performed in cheaper climes. Indeed, only hands-on or face-to-face services look safe. "Janitors and crane operators are probably immune to foreign competition," Blinder writes, "accountants and computer programmers are not."

There follow some back-of-the-envelope calculations as Blinder totes up the number of jobs in tradable and non-tradable sectors. Then comes his (necessarily imprecise) bottom line: "The total number of current U.S. service-sector jobs that will be susceptible to offshoring in the electronic future is two to three times the total number of current manufacturing jobs (which is about 14 million)." As Blinder believes that all those manufacturing jobs are offshorable, too, the grand total of American jobs that could be bound for Bangalore or Bangladesh is somewhere between 42 million and 56 million. [emphasis mine] That doesn't mean all those jobs are going to be exported. It does mean that the Americans performing them will be in competition with people who will do the same work for a whole lot less.