This is from an article in military.com about Gen. Shinseki's estimate for the troops required in Iraq (the article was written on the eve of the Iraq invasion, so it is NOT a case of 20/20 hindsight). The estimates range from nearly 300,000 all the way to 600,000
Instead what we have is about 150,000 (which was the estimate of Wolfowitz and other Dumbya cabinet chickenhawks). And the bozos who thought this was enough have been awarded medals by Dumbya (who in turn was elected by bozos like you).
Let's take a look at how many soldiers it takes or has taken to keep the peace in some of the world's leading trouble spots. The British Army in 1995 kept 19,000 troops in Northern Ireland to control a population of 1.6 million. That's one soldier for every 84 residents. If a similar ratio were applied to Iraq, the United States and its allies would need an occupation force of 285,000 troops.
In 1995, we had an international force of 60,000 to control the 4 million inhabitants of unhappy Bosnia. At that ratio, we would need 360,000 soldiers to occupy and control Iraq. In Kosovo, 50,000 soldiers now keep the peace among 2 million. Apply that formula to Iraq and you need an occupation force of 600,000.
What Shinseki was, in essence, saying was that unless a sizeable force of allies join us in Iraq, the peacekeeping effort there could employ virtually the entire deployable Army and Marine Corps. |
