In February 2003, Gen. Eric Shinseki famously predicted that “several hundred thousand” troops would be needed for post-war hostilities in Iraq. According to documents recently released by the Pentagon in response to The New York Times’s expose on its propaganda program, however, Donald Rumsfeld claimed in a 2006 briefing that the reason why he did not support a larger invasion force was because commanders did not request it:
RUMSFELD: Now, it turns out he [Shinkseki] was right. The commanders–you guys ended up wanting roughly the same as you had for the major combat operation, and that’s what we have. There is no damned guidebook that says what the number ought to be. We were queued up to go up to what, 400-plus thousand.QUESTION: Yes, they were already in queue.RUMSFELD: They were in the queue. We would have gone right on if they’d wanted them, but they didn’t, so life goes on.
In reality, Rumsfeld fought back when generals like Shinseki requested more troops. He said in 2003 that Shinseki was “far from the mark.” As McClatchy reported in 2004, “Central Command originally proposed a force of 380,000 to attack and occupy Iraq. Rumsfeld’s opening bid was about 40,000. … By September 2003, Rumsfeld and his aides thought, there would be very few American troops left in Iraq.”
This post from ThinkProgress is about Rumsfeld’s utter naivity in his Invasion of Iraq – a mistake carried into the present. The kind of Surge that would be needed to get control of Iraq would be to raise troop levels to the size of Saddam’s Army – 350,000. But that is a lightweight mistake compared to invading Iraq in the first place. But now, when antiwar critics retrospectively criticize the conduct of the war, we are told, "Yes. We made mistakes. But we have to deal with what to do now." And now it seems that we cannot send 7,000 troops where they’re needed in Afghanistan, because of our committment in Iraq [The Army’s Math Problem].
This is not The Army’s Math Problem. This is America’s Leadership Problem, very easily rectified.
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