03 September 2003

For the President, the Least Painful Alternative, Dana Milbank, Wednesday, September 3, 2003 The significance of this circumstance will probably elude my friends at Lucianne.com. The circumstance is, of course, worthy of yet another BIG "I TOLD YOU SO". This incompetent Republican administration with its little "neocons" have been totally wrong in their entire assessment of the requirements for war, the reaction of the the Iraqi people, and the requirements for (is it really?) the "post war" period. In some ways it looks like the war is just beginning. Or at least there is like this quick "follow-on" war that nobody anticipated. So the village idiots are finally going to do the right thing. Big deal. I hope the media resounds with "I TOLD YOU SO" you stupid oafs. "For months, the president and his administration have resisted the notion of sharing power in Iraq with the U.N. "blue helmets" -- part of officials' longstanding suspicion of the international body and particularly the notion that U.S. troops might answer to foreign generals." "But as more and more U.S. troops are killed in Iraq, and the number of car bombings and anti-America demonstrations there grow, the Bush administration concluded that principle alone will not suffice: The United States needs more help in Iraq." "With too few U.S. troops available to serve in Iraq, and too few nations volunteering troops in the absence of a U.N. imprimatur, the administration decided to do what the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.) suggested recently: "swallow our pride and do what's supposed to be done: go back to the international community." Then, of course, it looks like the much maligned General Shinseki was closer to the mark in his estimate of the the requirements for the Iraqi campaign. In another fine article, we find the bitter truth of the whole thing: Bush Looks to U.N. to Share Burden on Troops in Iraq, New York Times, 2 September 2003 By DAVID E. SANGER and DAVID FIRESTONE "The study, released today by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, was requested by Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, a critic of the Iraq war and the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, who was frustrated by the Bush administration's reluctance to discuss its personnel options in Iraq or the long-term cost of a sustained occupation force. The report said that if the Pentagon stuck to its plan of rotating active-duty Army troops out of Iraq after a year, it would be able to sustain a force of only 67,000 to 106,000 active duty and reserve Army and Marine forces. A larger force would put at risk the military's operations elsewhere around the globe, the study said. With Mr. Bush concerned about the ramifications of continued daily casualties in Iraq and the possibility that he may need forces elsewhere, perhaps including the Korean Peninsula if the nuclear crisis there worsens, the need to draw more international forces became "very clear in the past few weeks," a senior State Department official said today. Last week, floating what appeared to be a trial balloon, the deputy secretary of state, Richard L. Armitage, said the United States was considering a multinational force that would be under the United Nations flag but, he added, an "American would be the U.N. commander." That was essentially the model for American forces stationed in South Korea after the end of the Korean War, 50 years ago, and it has been repeated elsewhere in the world. Currently, there are about 180,000 American troops in Iraq and Kuwait and 21,000 non-American troops, about half of them from Britain. Military planners have long said the United States will require substantial assistance from other countries and from Iraqis to remain in the country over the long term, and today's study underscored that need. It is also the first time a government agency has placed a date on the point when the American military may buckle under the strain of the Iraqi deployment unless it gets significantly more help from other countries." It is trully breathtaking the amount of incompetence the American people will put up with.     5:47:17 PM    comment [] trackback []

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