by James Glaser
December 8, 2004

Sometimes I start to think that nobody in Washington gives a rat's ass about our troops and then someone like John McCain speaks out on their behalf. It was reported on Tuesday (In a British Paper, The Herald Sun) that the Arizona Senator has criticized the Pentagon for failing to stabilize Iraq and that McCain "Refused to endorse the reappointment of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. (The Brits spell defense with a c)

Last week John McCain said that the increase in troop strength by 12,000 was not enough. Before the War started American Generals were saying that we would need at least 300,000 troops to do this war right. In the first Gulf War we had a coalition with over 500,000 troops. Right now we are using 138,000 of our troops.

George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld keep saying that if the Generals in the field think they need more troops, then they would send them. No General in his right mind is going to tell the President or the Secretary of Defense that they are wrong and they need more troops. Those guys want to stay in the service and a call like that would mean a fast and early retirement. Plus they wouldn't get any high paying civilian job when the leave, because Defense contractors would know that they don't know how to play the game.

McCain doesn't like how the Pentagon has been handling the war. He said, "Allowing Fallujah to become an insurgent stronghold was such a mistake." He went on with, "Many of us, as long as a year and a half ago, said, you have to have more people there. You have to have more linguists. You have to have more special forces-and the Pentagon has reluctantly, obviously, gradually made some increases."

With the new troops and those that they are not letting come home when there time is up, will increase troop strength to 150,000. McCain said that this number was still inadequate and "extending the tours of troops was terrible for Morale."

In this same Iraqi topic, the CIA Station Chief in Baghdad sent a report that the situation in Iraq is deteriorating and may not rebound any time soon.

CBS News reports that this cable from the Station Chief was sent late in November as the officer ended a yearlong tour and it presented a bleak assessment on matters of politics, economics, and security.

Of course you and I will never get to see a report like that, however if it had been filled with "good news," it would have been released right away. The same goes for the report about what John McCain had to say. British media carries news like that, but few American outlets do.

Yesterday National Public Radio reported that 11 Americans were killed this weekend in Iraq. Two were killed on Tuesday, one from small arms fire in Baghdad while on patrol and the other in an accident in western Anbar province.

Iraq is getting so bad that fire fights are breaking out in Baghdad, a city we were supposed to have secured over a year ago. The road from Baghdad to the airport is a regular battle zone, with troops and civilians getting killed along it every week.

Before George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld became in charge of our National Defense, there was something called the Weinberger/Powell doctrine. It was named after Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and our now Secretary of State Colin Powell, who back then was an aid to Weinberger. It said that War should be a last resort, there should be clear objectives that are defined so we all know what they are, and there should be a sufficient number of troops to do the job. It also said that when the troops had done the job, bring them home.

Bush and Rumsfeld wanted to do something different. They wanted to use few troops, lots of bombs, and no stated objectives. It worked for the battle portion of the War with Iraq, but has failed miserably ever since. We will never know how many young Americans gave their lives or limbs so that Bush and Rumsfeld could try out this theory.

John McCain is one of the few officials in Washington to stand up for the troops and say that things are not going the way the White House and Pentagon tell us it is. He wants to have more troops over there to save American lives. I sure hope some others in our government will stand with him and save some lives that will be wasted if we don't change our tactics now!

I have to think that we went to Iraq to look for those Weapons of Mass Destruction and we have done that, There were none. We also wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein and his government. We did that. Let us now bring our troops home........NOW!