On Thursday President Bush made a foray to Fort Benning, GA in an effort to drum up support for his proposed escalation among those being asked to make the sacrifices for his plan.
The reception the president received was decidedly cooler than a Commander in Chief generally enjoys on a military installation. The crowd was decidedly subdued during the lunchtime address. Perhaps the fact that members of the Third Infantry Division, Third Brigade, have already served two tours in Iraq, and some were notified Thursday that they would deploy for a a third tour, and their deployment date had been stepped up by two months, as a result of the presidents scheme to achieve something resembling "victory" in the Iraq fiasco. Now they will ship out in mid-March instead of in May.
Under the new plan, more than 20,000 additional troops will be sent to Iraq, some from Fort Benning who learned Thursday that they would go earlier than expected. But instead of centering his address on the soldiers’ situation, Mr. Bush seemed to be aiming his talk at ordinary Americans and members of Congress who are skeptical of his proposal.Dan Bartlett, White House counselor, who accompanied the president to Fort Benning replayed the days feedback-loop that if Democrats were going to criticize, they must come up with something better.“Those who have decided to judge this plan before it has a chance to work have a greater responsibility to propose something that will work,” Mr. Bartlett said. “We’ve yet to see that from the Democrats.”
Mr. Bush acknowledged, as he did in his televised address to the nation on Wednesday night, that he had miscalculated the number of troops necessary to execute the military’s “clear, hold and build” strategy of securing Baghdad neighborhoods and tamping down sectarian violence.
“What’s new about this plan is there will be enough troops to clear, build and hold, and that our troops will be able to move alongside the Iraqis without political interference, and that’s very important,” the president said. He added, “This is something different that enables the military folks to predict that we will succeed in helping quell sectarian violence in Baghdad. The new strategy is not going to yield immediate results, it’s going to take a while,” he said, adding, “Yet over time, we can expect to see positive results.”
Mr. Bartlett would be well served to check with HASC Chairman Ike Skelton, Representative John Murtha, or Senate Majority leader Harry Reid before repeating that cannard again, because there is no way to spin it...When he says this, he is lying. His unwillingness to admit that many Democrats have offered plans soes not negate their existence.
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I would also like to close this post by taking a moment to remind everyone that Mr. Bush claiming he "miscalculated" what force levels would be needed to depose Saddam Hussein and maintain order in a post-Saddam Iraq is disingenuous. The data was available, and it backed up everything General Eric Shinseki and others said before was based on a series of war-games known as Desert Crossing. Desert Crossing was conducted under the leadership of General Anthony Zinni, then commander of CENTCOM. The exercises tested "most likely" and "worst case" scenarios. The Desert Crossing exercises revealed that it would take upwards of 400,000 troops to secure the nation of Iraq after an overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and that even with that amount of manpower the country would probably still slide toward chaos.
From the report:
"There was consensus that the United States would not intervene without coalition support except under the most dire circumstances such as WMD use or catastrophic humanitarian disaster." --- Desert Crossing After Action Report, 1999.
"When it looked like we were going in, I called back down to CENTCOM and said, 'You need to dust off Desert Crossing.' They said, 'What's that? Never heard of it.'"--- General Anthony Zinni (ret.), 2004.So you see, the only possible reasons for the president's "miscalculation" are incompetence, willful ignorance or mendacity. Whatever the reason he ignored the Generals from the outset, I see absolutely no reason that he should be trusted with more lives and treasure.
