our army will be elsewhere...while North Korea is ready to nuke it's neighbors
SHOWDOWN WITH IRAQ
A Huge Postwar Force Seen
Army chief's estimate of 'several hundred thousand soldiers' is a surprise to lawmakers.
By John Hendren, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON -- Peacekeeping and humanitarian operations after a war
with Iraq would probably require "several hundred thousand soldiers," the
Army's chief of staff said Tuesday -- a force approaching the number of U.S.
troops massing for a possible war in the Persian Gulf.
Gen. Eric K. Shinseki told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the
Bush administration would need to keep a large force in Iraq even after the
war to curb ethnic tensions and provide humanitarian aid. Asked to name a
figure, the four-star general said: "I would say that what's been mobilized to
this point, something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers."
The general's comments came as chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix
said Tuesday in New York that Iraq has offered its first signs of "substantive
cooperation" by turning up two bombs, one possibly filled with a biological
agent.
Blix said he has received eight letters from Iraq in the last several days with
information on past weapons programs, including the recent discovery of two
R-400 aerial bombs at a site where Iraq had disposed of biological weapons
before. One of them is filled with "a liquid that appears to be biological" and
would be tested soon, he said. Blix said the information on past programs
includes discovery of handwritten documents about the disposal of prohibited
weapons in 1991.
The general's statement that a peacekeeping force approaching the estimated
200,000 Americans now forming an arc around the Persian Gulf would be
required after a war stunned some lawmakers. One senior Democrat
questioned whether the Bush administration could go forward with a war that
would require such a force after combat unless it received more support from
the United Nations Security Council. So far, only three of the other 14 council
members have indicated support for the administration's plans.
"It would be a huge proportion of the deployable force," Sen. Carl Levin of
Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said in an interview. "It
reinforces the importance of trying to keep the Security Council together....
There's no way we can keep 200,000 troops in Iraq for a substantial time.
That's too large a force."
Troops from other countries would be needed for such a large peacekeeping
operation, Levin said. The Army, the branch usually called on for such
missions, puts the number of troops available to be deployed abroad at
293,000, out of a total of 480,000.
"What Shinseki is saying is that if we don't have allies in Iraq, peacekeeping
could employ the entire deployable army," said Loren Thompson, a defense
analyst at the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va., public policy group.
Shinseki and Gen. John P. Jumper, Air Force chief of staff, told the committee
that some parts of the military already were strained because of current
deployments in Afghanistan, South Korea, the Sinai and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
In 1997, the Pentagon estimated that U.S. troops would be out of Bosnia
within a year; several thousand soldiers remain there.
"They are stressed," said Shinseki, who noted that the special operations units
were particularly affected. "We are using them on multiple missions that a few
years ago [were] not anticipated."
The Pentagon appeared to downplay the estimate immediately after the
hearing. Army officials cautioned that Shinseki was merely offering a rough
estimate. One senior defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said
that the general simply "misspoke."
Another senior defense official from a service other than the Army noted that
Shinseki, who retires in June, does not have a reputation as a grandstander.
"He's always been a stand-up guy and a pretty straightforward guy," the
official said. "That's probably a good-faith estimate."
During the hearing, the uniformed chiefs of all four military services said they
were prepared for war. "This force is ready, and it is the most ready that it has
been in my entire military life," Adm. Vern Clark, the chief of naval operations,
said of the Navy.
But the possible size of the postwar commitment came as a surprise, in large
part because estimates from outside organizations had suggested that a smaller
force would be needed.
One estimate, by Steven M. Kosiak of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessments, a Washington public policy organization, suggested that although
150,000 troops would be in Iraq for six months, only 20,000 to 90,000
would remain over five years, for a total cost of $25 billion to $105 billion.
Another, by defense analyst Anthony Cordesman, suggested that the number
would drop below 100,000 within "several months to a year."
"We're not really talking about occupying Iraq, we're talking about establishing
security until Iraq works out its own initial issues," said Cordesman, a former
Pentagon official who is now a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington. "But the fact is that we have to win the
peace just as much as we have to win the war, and if it takes a large U.S.
presence to allow the Iraqis to create some kind of a stable federal republic
then we're going to have to provide whatever it takes."
Shinseki said he based his estimate on the need for a large force to maintain
security in a nation with "ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems."
Iraq has multiple ethnic groups with long-standing grievances, analyst Thompson said, and some might
seek to seize land and settle scores.
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