Originally posted by: ProfJohn
I think we are forgetting that the "need more troops" argument is based on hindsight.
No one seems to have predicted that Iraq would fall apart like this.
Sure that was a HUGE mistake on our part. But can you blame the generals for that mistake?
The generals were given a mission to do and they picked the forces needed in order to accomplish that mission, and they did that mission in stunning fashion.
Can anyone find statements pre war by people on the left stating that Iraq would fall apart like it did and that this insurgency would be nearly as bad as it is?
Finally, can one of the "more troops" people point me to a fair and balanced web site with historic quotes and reasoning behind the need for more troops. Did these guys ask for more troops cause they thought we would need that many to win the war, or was it because they predicted the level of chaos that would follow our victory?
Indeed, no one except perhaps virtually all the experts who extensivly studied and planned months before the first boot of the first soldier hit the ground in Iraq. To be fair, that's not quite right, the experts did not predict Iraq would fall apart, what they did was make numerous suggestions about how the occupation should be carried out to AVOID disaster. The Bush administration ignored virtually all of those recommendations, and Iraq has, as you put it, fallen apart. So in some sense you could say that the experts predicted Iraq would fall apart, but only in the context of leadership that ignored their recommendations.
I don't want to bother digging up all the information on the topic, but feel free to actually look around, it's not hard to find...I suggest Googling "Blind into Baghdad", an excellent article on the topic. And I think you'll find that people who disagreed with the rosy view of the Bush administration are hardly exclusivly lefties. But I will highlight a few of my favorites. At the top of the list is General Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff at the time. His experience in Kosovo suggested that we'd need a lot more troops than were being allocated to really do the occupation right (he wasn't worried at all about winning the war itself), he feared that too few troops would put us in a situation where we would win the war, but lose the occupation. In other words, he made the recommendation that is being considered by some people now, but Shinseki did it before the war had even started, when it would have done a lot more good. The current situation is what he suggested would happen if we didn't bring the troops we needed for the occupation, which put him in opposition to Rumsfeld's position, that we'd need LESS troops to occupy Iraq than we did to win the war. Thomas White, the Secretary of the Army at the time, put the number at about 400,000, Rumsfeld countered with a truly silly 75,000. The "compromise" between an informed military opinion and self-delusional bullshit, was about 200,000...when the Army firmly believed 400,000 troops were necessary to prevent being "shorthanded in the aftermath" (White's words) to prevent "crime and chaos" (General Zinni, former CENTCOM commander).
But my absolute favorite pre-war statement, and probably closest to what you're looking for here, comes from that hated bastion of "liberal" thinking, an academic study at a university. Their conclusion in their report goes like this "U.S. and coalition military units will need to pivot quickly from combat to peacekeeping operations in order to prevent post-conflict Iraq from descending into anarchy...Without an initial and broad-based commitment to law and order, the logic of score-settling and revenge-taking will reduce Iraq to chaos." Since we didn't have the former (probably due in part to not dedicating the troops the military experts had calculated were necessary), we got the latter.
It isn't really a statement, but I think perhaps the best pre-war study on the topic was done by the Army War College. They suggested doing a lot of things that, looking back, would have been great ideas. Things like removing the previous regime's influence from the government without totally dismanteling the entire structure (as we did in post-Nazi Germany, but NOT in Iraq), securing the border to prevent terrorists from slipping in (which we didn't do either, again, maybe the lack of troops made it difficult). They came up with a checklist of things to do to help ensure stability in post-war Iraq, which included those things and many others, and warned what might happen if those objectives weren't accomplished quickly. A related study at the National War College warned of the issues that might arise with attacks on the electrical grid, a necessary part of the conflict, and came up with a plan (that wasn't implemented) to take out the grid for the period of the war itself, but allow quick repair so the country would quickly regain electricity. That approach was not taken, and Baghdad itself STILL has electricity shortages.
This idea that disaster in Iraq was some inevitable thing that no one predicted is fantasy. Not only were our current problems predicted, multiple ways were suggested on how to avoid them. As those suggestions were ignored by the Bush administration (especially Rumsfeld), it should have come as no surprise that we ended up with our current situation. But I suppose that's what you get when you have a political climate that truly and visciously hates experts of any kind and things stubbornly sticking to your own ideas and opinions, no matter how silly they might be, is some kind of virtue.
Facebook
Twitter