Who said "anytime soon"? I didn't. McCain certainly didn't. Stop making inaccurate quotes, Wag. First of all, "many people now have come to understand" is a HUGE assumption on your part. Who are these "many people"? The same ones who warned we would need hundreds of thousands more to even defeat Saddam? The ones who warned it would take years, if ever, to remove him and the Ba'athists? Ted Kennedy? Until I hear it from Gen. Abizaid (and he has made it clear that no more US troops are needed at this time, that they would need more in a worst-case scenario), it's all second-guessing by the dodoheads who could and have made a career out of it. Second of all, we already have "several thousand" troops in Iraq. More than several, in fact.
Even "our" man John Mc Cain ( who I have a tremendous amount of respect for ) and several other supporters of the Army in Congress have also called for increasing the Army's end strength by one or two divisions. The US Army recently reported that nearly half of its combat brigadesâsixteen out of thirty-three--are bogged down in occupation operations in Iraq, with the rest in Kuwait, Afghanistan and the Balkans and elsewhere throughout the world. Nearly three-quarters of the Armyâs combat brigades are currently deployed in Afghanistan and in and around Iraq. Under Rumsfeld, by next spring all but three of the Army's combat brigades will either be in Iraq or on their way home from Iraq. Some of them will come home from Iraq and head almost immediately to Afghanistan or Bosnia or South Korea or the Sinai Desert. Over 370,000 US Army troops or over seventy-five percent of its total force is currently deployed in about 120 countries worldwide leaving just over 100,000 troops to defend the country from a hypothetical attack and safeguard its borders. One military analyst has called the massive scale of this unprecedented US military deployment the equivalent of "civilization building", resulting in a serious and costly overextension of our ground forces. Furthermore, for the first time in contemporary US history, there are no active US Army brigades available for deployment in the event of a crisis. Operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans have stretched the Army so thin that when Lt. Gen. John Vines, the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan, recently requested one more Army battalion be deployed to that country, service leaders could not find one in the active force. So go ahead and look the other way. Continue to bury your head in the sand. Don't listen to Mc Cain, or Army Chief of Staff General Shinseki, or Lt. General Vines . . . Just keep on believing all of that propoganda from Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. You are so freaking blind . . . that you cannot see reality even with it hitting you straight upside the head!
Wag, post all the numbers you want until you go blue in the face. If the head guy on the ground, Gen. Abizaid, says X = X, I'll continue to believe him. NOT Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, but Abizaid. If I disagree with you on a point and state my source as a general in Iraq, why do you have to label it as "propaganda from Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld"? You have tunnel vision, my friend. Try to look at the situation objectively without your "I hate Bush" point of view for a change. Are our forces stretched thin? Yes. Is the situation, a couple thousand militia and some Saddam loyalists, enough to warrant going into panic/crisis mode as you and so many here on ET seem to espouse? The man on the ground says no, and I prefer to believe him rather than you. Besides, you haven't even heard the Pentagon's plans for reassigning forces from other areas i.e. Korea, Europe, etc. Relax your sphincter, Wag.
I guess you feel that Army Chief of Staff, General Shinseki has no freaking idea what he was talking about a year ago, eh? By the way, I am not saying that I am "panicking" simply because of the resistance that we are encountering in places like Fallujah, Kut, Kufa, Najaf, or the western outskirts of Baghdad. I'm just stating the fact that once again the Bush Administration has made a terrible miscalculation. It is a shame if you can't see that. But then again you obviously aren't interested in numbers or facts, just the rhetoric of an administration that prides itself on being in control and never making a mistake. You place great trust in General Abizaid. Unfortunately, you fail to realize who his boss is!
Not at all. I have a lot of respect for Gen. Shinseki, partly because he's from my neck of the woods (Hawaii). But number predictions are based on a lot of variables, and if Abizaid says we don't need more men at this time, I believe him. Shinseki is not in Iraq, on the ground, monitoring the situation. Abizaid is. This is your opinion only, not a "fact." LOL! Wag, I could just as easily say that you aren't interested in numbers or facts, just the rhetoric of a cowardly, leftist portion of our population that is terribly misguided, cannot see the long-term view at all, and is blinded by its hatred for the incumbent president. Ahhh, the old if-you-can't-trust-the-guy-on-top-all-his-subordinates-are-rotten-to-the-core argument. So you think Bush/Rumsfeld are telling him: "Yo General, don't ask for any more men or we'll fire you"? ROFL! As a former soldier, Wag, I think Abizaid's first and foremost concern is for the welfare of his men. I do not for one second believe that he would not request reinforcements if the situation called for them.
Asleep on Alert By William Raspberry Monday, April 5, 2004; Page A17 As regular readers of this column may have deduced, I am not a huge fan of President Bush's. I would not throw myself off a cliff if his turned out to be a one-term presidency. Still, just what am I supposed to conclude if the allegations against him regarding his pre-Sept. 11 leadership prove even partially correct? That he was fixated on Saddam Hussein goes without saying. But was that fixation at the expense of anti-terrorist action he might have taken to prevent the attacks? That clearly is the implication of the inquiry (in the media and by the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission) into the extent to which members of the Bush administration ignored credible intelligence before terrorists commandeered those four American airliners and turned three of them into jet-propelled bombs. Is this reexamination of recent and painful history likely to make us smarter -- render us less vulnerable to future terrorist attacks? Or is it little more than Monday-morning quarterbacking, where any armchair critic can explain how the play that didn't work couldn't have worked? The fixation on Hussein can be explained many ways: an angry president's desire to avenge his father for an alleged attempt on the older Bush's life; an insecure president's hope to prove himself a man among men; or an inexperienced president's ensnarlment in the ideologically driven machinations of his key advisers. Peter R. Neumann, an anti-terrorism scholar at King's College London, offers a useful reminder. Before Sept. 11 most experts -- not just those in the Bush administration -- assumed that international terror was a state-sponsored phenomenon. It took a while for the notion to take hold that al Qaeda was something new on the scene -- terrorism without centralized, geographically based leadership. (It also took a while, as Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, remarked a week ago, for anyone to figure out that commercial airliners could be used as weapons.) But everybody knows it now. Will going over it all again make us less vulnerable next time? Will we be clearer on what to do? Two polls released last week drive home the point I want to make. One, from the Council for Excellence in Government, found that less than half of all Americans think government action since Sept. 11 has made us safer -- and more than three out of four believe there will be a major terrorist attack, here or abroad, in the next few months. In other words, like the Bush administration post-Sept. 11, we have waked up. But look at the other survey, this one by USA Today/CNN/Gallup. A majority of Americans have failed to follow the government's advice on how to prepare for a terrorist attack. Only about 40 percent of us report having a stockpile of food and water at home -- down from 60 percent a year ago. Only 25 percent have designated a "safe room" in their homes. (Remember when we were told to use plastic sheets and duct tape to seal off that special refuge?) USA Today quoted Marsha Evans, president of the American Red Cross, as saying: "Americans are asleep at the switch when it comes to their own safety." No. It isn't that we are oblivious to terrorist threats but that we understand how little we can do about those threats so long as they remain as vague as a national "Code Yellow." I wasn't oblivious to the threat of the Washington sniper, but I didn't stop driving the Beltway or gassing up my car or going to shopping malls. I could have made myself safer from the sniper, no doubt, by moving into my basement -- and I might have done so had I been told the sniper was looking for me, or was believed to be lurking in my neighborhood. But knowing only that he was probably in the Washington area was too vague a threat to change my routine. That's why I haven't plastic-sheeted and duct-taped that "safe room." I'd do so in a heartbeat if I had reason to believe the next terrorist attack would be in my part of town, and that it would occur while my family and I were at home, and that going to the safe room would be safer than leaving the house for one of those evacuation routes being worked up by other government agencies. You don't have to be "asleep at the switch" to decide that you can't hide under a rock. And that goes for the government, too.
Bush was, is and always will be a lightweight. He surrounded himself a bunch of whacked out idealouges and then squelched all dissent and dialogue and covered all with great secrecy. Recipe for disaster and disaster is what we'll get. We need intelligence, cunning, shrewdness...what we've got is dumb-as-a-post policy-makers and disastrously stupid foriegn policy. m