Overstretched
Army Bring
Bush New Grief
By Jim Lobe
27 September, 2006
Inter Press
Service
WASHINGTON,
Sep 25 (IPS) - With the U.S. intelligence community agreed that the
invasion and occupation of Iraq have made this country less safe from
terrorist threats, President George W. Bush appears now to be facing
a growing revolt among top military commanders who say U.S. ground forces
are stretched close to the breaking point.
According to Monday's Los
Angeles Times, the Army's top officer, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, has called
for nearly a 50 percent increase in spending -- to nearly 140 billion
dollars -- in 2008 to cope with the situation in Iraq and maintain minimal
readiness for possible emergencies.
To convey his seriousness,
Schoomaker reportedly withheld the Army's scheduled budget request last
month in what the Times called an "unprecedented... protest"
against previous rejections by the White House of funding increases.
The news of Schoomaker's
action, which is almost certain to intensify the growing debate over
what to do in Iraq just seven weeks before the Nov. 7 mid-term Congressional
elections, comes just days after the New York Times reported that the
Army is considering activating substantially more National Guard troops
or reservists.
Such a decision, which would
run counter to previous administration pledges to limit overseas deployments
for the Guard, would pose serious political risks for the Republicans
if it was taken before the elections.
Unlike career soldiers, the
Guard consists mainly of "citizen-soldiers" with families
and jobs and deep roots in local communities. When the Pentagon last
called up substantial numbers of Guard units for service in Iraq and
Afghanistan in late 2003 and 2004, the move elicited a strong backlash
in communities across the country.
With the war even less popular
now than it was then, any major new call-up is likely to trigger renewed
protests, particularly in light of the growing sense both among the
national security elites and the general population that the administration's
decision to invade Iraq was a major mistake and that the war is unwinnable.
Recent public opinion polls
have shown that the public has become increasingly pessimistic about
the war's outcome and its impact on the larger "global war on terror".
Earlier this month, for example,
a New York Times/CBS poll found that nearly two-thirds of respondents
believed the war in Iraq was going either "somewhat" (28 percent)
or "very badly" (33 percent).
For most of the past year,
a majority of respondents in various polls have said they believe the
decision to go to war in Iraq was a mistake and that it has made the
United States less, rather than more, safe from terrorism.
The fact that a similar conclusion
was reportedly reached by the 16 agencies, including the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) that make up the U.S. intelligence community last April
in a rare National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) is likely to add to the
public's pessimism.
The NIE, some of whose contents
were leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post over the weekend,
found that the Iraq war has invigorated Islamic radicalism worldwide
and aggravated the terrorist threat faced by the United States and other
countries.
While the director of national
intelligence, John Negroponte, insisted Sunday that the newspaper accounts
of the report's conclusions were partial and selective, they nonetheless
backed up what a number of former senior intelligence analysts -- most
recently, the recently retired head of the CIA's Political Islam Strategic
Analysis Programme, Emile Nakhleh -- have been saying individually for
much of the past year.
While Democratic lawmakers
called Monday for the administration to immediately declassify the NIE,
"Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States",
so that the public could decide for itself, it is certain to intensify
the debate about whether to begin withdrawing from Iraq or whether to
"stay the course" there, despite the growing sectarian violence
and the wear and tear on U.S. ground forces.
For most of the past year,
the administration and senior military commanders expressed hope that
they could reduce U.S. forces in Iraq from the approximately 140,000
troops who were there last December to help protect the parliamentary
elections by as much as 30,000 by the end of this year.
But, with the rise in sectarian
violence, particularly in Baghdad, that followed the bombing last winter
of a major Shiite shrine in Samarra, Washington has been forced to abandon
those hopes. Last week, the senior U.S. Middle East commander, Gen.
John Abizaid, made it official when he told reporters here that he needed
at least 140,000 troops in Iraq through next spring.
Even this number of troops,
however, has not proved sufficient to curb the violence in Baghdad,
while a recent report from the senior Marine intelligence officer in
Anbar province, which comprises about one-third of Iraq's total territory,
warned that the 30,000 U.S. troops deployed there could not defeat the
Sunni insurgency without the addition of at least 13,000 troops and
substantially more economic assistance.
Adding to the burden on the
army and the marines, the resurgence of the Taliban has forced Washington
to cancel plans to reduce forces in Afghanistan from 19,000 earlier
this year to around 16,000 by this fall.
Instead, Washington currently
has more than 20,000 troops deployed there amid signs that more may
be needed if NATO fails to provide more troops of its own or if, in
light of the retreat of Pakistani forces from neighbouring Waziristan,
the Taliban mount an even bigger offensive from across the border next
spring after the snows melt.
These commitments have taken
a huge, unanticipated toll on U.S. land forces, not just in manpower,
but in equipment and money, as well.
Before the war, the Pentagon's
political appointees confidently predicted that Iraq's oil production
would very quickly pay for the invasion's financial costs and that Washington
could draw down U.S. forces to as few as 30,000 by the end of 2003.
In fact, about 400 billion
dollars -- almost all of it for military operations -- has been appropriated
for both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars since September 2001, and current
operations there are running at about nine billion dollars a month.
The Army, which has some
500,000 active-duty soldiers, has been allocated 98 billion dollar this
year, and the White House has cleared it to receive 114 billion dollars
for 2008. But Schoomaker has reportedly asked for 139 billion dollars,
including at least 13 billion dollars needed to repair equipment. "There's
no sense in us submitting a budget that we can't execute, a broken budget,"
he warned recently in a speech here.
In addition to strains on
both the land forces and their equipment, senior military leaders are
also worried about attrition among mid-ranking officers, in particular,
and the quality and cost of new recruits.
The military has greatly
intensified its recruitment efforts, relaxed its age and education requirements
for enlistment, and offered unprecedented bonuses and benefits packages
-- worth thousands of dollars -- to enlistees and active-duty soldiers
who re-enlist.
It has also increased enlistments
by individuals with "'serious criminal misconduct" in their
records," and eased requirements of non-citizens -- of which there
are currently about 40,000 in the armed services -- and made them eligible
to citizenship after only one day of active-duty military service.
Comment
On This Article