In Ireland on Monday, Condi Rice warned Syria to tighten control of the 600 mile border between Syria and Iraq, saying that the Syrian regime was allowing militants to cross the border and join the Iraq insurgency.

Syria, which has a considerably smaller and overwhelmingly less sophisticated military than does the US, may be turning a blind eye in some instances to the passage of men and weapons across the border. It’s worth noting, however, that the United States, with its far superior technology, is unable to fully control much less remote borders with Mexico, and that neither Iraq nor Syria were able to prevent smuggling of people, oil and contraband across the Iraq-Syria border even when neither of the countries were in flames.

To get some perspective on the problem of controlling 600 miles of remote, desolate border, consider that the 380-mile Arizona-Mexico border, patrolled by unmanned drones and border patrol agents armed with some of the most advanced equipment available, is among the most porous sections of the 2000-mile border between the US and our southern neighbor; of the million or so illegal immigrants caught crossing the Mexico-US border last year, more than half were apprehended in Arizona. And border patrol agents estimate that they apprehend no more than a third of those attempting to enter.

No doubt the Syrians are happy to poke the US in the eye if a safe opportunity arises. But we have 140,000 heavily armed, highly mobile troops operating the most sophisticated surveillance equipment in the world, and we can’t control that 600-mile border either; we just sent more than a thousand Marines and soldiers into one small area of the region and were unable to apprehend or kill more than a relative handful of the insurgents thought to be operating there.

So it looks as though we have two choices: either we can provide the Syrians with some of our high-tech goodies and pay them to have at it, or we can add another 20,000 or so troops to our Iraq forces and task them with the responsibility of sealing the border.

Neither of those two things are likely to happen, and even if they did, we’d still have the Iraq-Saudi Arabia border to contend with, along with the much shorter but still unruly Turkey-Iraq border and the much longer Iran-Iraq border, none of which lend themselves to easy interdiction.

Of course the reason we can’t seal the borders is the same reason we can’t do much by way of forcing anyone else to seal them: we don’t have the manpower because we blew up Iraq and can’t put it back together.

In other Rice-related news, Iraq’s new constitution is scheduled to be completed by sometime in August. During her just-concluded visit to the country, Rice urged the new government to hurry things up. The deadline for the constitution is now only three months away, a period which is, coincidentally, the same amount of time it took to seat the new interim government.

Granted the Iraqis have more in the way of templates to work with than the men who wrote our Constitution, but three months seems a bit unrealistic given the centrifugal forces acting upon the parliament that is expected to produce it. It took some eight years of struggle by some of the finest minds this country has ever produced to move from the Articles of Confederation to a Constitution that could survive ratification by the states, and it’s fair to say that the sectarian and philosophical divisions among our founders were not as severe as those afflicting the Iraqis, and nor were the conditions our authors labored under quite as apocalyptic as those the Iraqis face; at the very least, no one was lobbing mortar rounds into the meeting rooms, and the delegates were more or less free to travel the country at will.

August can be unpleasant even in the best of climes. We’re not in the best of climes.

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