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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PROLIFE who wrote (753082)	11/2/2006 10:38:22 PM
From: BEEF JERKEY	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

7 Retired US Generals And Admirals Speak On Iraq Rolling Stone has an article with comments by 7 US Generals and Admirals on what they think of the situation in Iraq. I'm including excerpts from just two of them below. Gen. Merrill "Tony" McPeak, Air Force chief of staff, 1990-94, says our force in Iraq is too small. We have a force in Iraq that's much too small to stabilize the situation. It's about half the size, or maybe even a third, of what we need. As a consequence, the insurgency seems to be gathering momentum. We are losing people at a fairly steady rate of about two a day; wounded, about four or five times that, and perhaps half of these wounds are very serious. And we are also sustaining gunshot wounds, when, before, we'd mostly been seeing massive trauma from remotely detonated charges. This means the other side is standing and fighting in a way that describes a more dangerous phase of the conflict. The people in control in the Pentagon and the White House live in a fantasy world. They actually thought everyone would just line up and vote for a new democracy and you would have a sort of Denmark with oil. I blame Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the people behind him -- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary Douglas Feith. The vice president himself should probably be included; certainly his wife. These so-called neocons: These people have no real experience in life. They are utopian thinkers, idealists, very smart, and they have the courage of their convictions, so it makes them doubly dangerous. Former CENTCOM commander General Anthony Zinni says of course our forces in Iraq have been too small from the start and the US military always knew it would need much larger forces to assert firm control of Iraq after an invasion. When I was commander of CENTCOM, we had a plan for an invasion of Iraq, and it had specific numbers in it. We wanted to go in there with 350,000 to 380,000 troops. You didn't need that many people to defeat the Republican Guard, but you needed them for the aftermath. We knew that we would find ourselves in a situation where we had completely uprooted an authoritarian government and would need to freeze the situation: retain control, retain order, provide security, seal the borders to keep terrorists from coming in. When I left in 2000, General Franks took over. Franks was my ground-component commander, so he was well aware of the plan. He had participated in it; those were the numbers he wanted. So what happened between him and Rumsfeld and why those numbers got altered, I don't know, because when we went in we used only 140,000 troops, even though General Eric Shinseki, the army commander, asked for the original number. Some serving officers are also critical of the conduct of the war. See my post US Military Officers Increasingly Critical Of US Strategy In Iraq. The need for a larger invasion force was foreseen in advance by military analysts and officers. From a previous post of mine here are some pointers to research work that shows how many troops are needed for peacekeeping operations. There were people (eg James Quinlivan) who in advance of the invasion of Iraq said that previous occupations showed that we needed a few times the number of troops to occupy Iraq than the Bush Administration was sending. US Army General Eric Shinseki got a lot of abuse from Rumsfeld for telling a Congressional committee estimates for troop needs for an Iraq occupation that were similar to what you'd expect from Quinlivan's analysis. Other think tank analysts made similar calculations and published similar numbers. Quinliven's writings on this go back to the 1990s. So these numbers were available before the invasion. See, for example, James T. Quinlivan, “Force Requirements in Stability Operations,” Parameters, 25 (Winter 1995-96), 59-69 which this article references. Rand has that article available here for order if you are interested. Quinliven was delivering briefings around at Washington DC think tanks on troop needs for occupation before the Iraq invasion. See his Summer 2003 Rand article Burden of Victory: The Painful Arithmetic of Stability Operations for an accessible summary of his research. Also see the report by Rand Corporation researcher James Dobbins and colleagues: America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq. Laura Rozen has excerpted from that study: THERE HAVE never been more than 160,000 coalition soldiers to control a population of 25 million Iraqis. Even adding in 20,000 private security contractors, that still amounts to only one soldier for every 139 Iraqis. According to a study conducted by James Dobbins and his colleagues at RAND, in most successful occupations, ranging from post-1945 Germany to post-1999 Kosovo, the figure has never been lower than one soldier per 50 people. In Iraq, that would mean 500,000 troops, or three times the number the coalition has today