http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1976587,00.html
Quote:
Bush plans bigger army amid fear of new Iraq deployment
· 30,000 more troops may be sent to quell violence
· Pentagon wants $100bn more for twin campaigns
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington, Michael Howard in Baghdad
Thursday December 21, 2006
The Guardian
President George Bush called yesterday for an increase in the size of the US military, deepening expectations that he will send up to 30,000 more troops to Iraq in the new year. In a sign of forthcoming changes at the Pentagon after the departure of Donald Rumsfeld as defence secretary, Mr Bush acknowledged that he had been taken aback by the eruption of sectarian violence in Iraq, and that it had been a difficult year.
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It is interesting.
If Democrats vote down the money to send more troops, then Iraq is their fault. They would have won, if they had only given Bush the tools he needed!
If Democrats vote more money to send more troops, then Iraq is their fault. I mean, they increased troop deployments!
Lovely catch-22 -- it kind of reminds me of Vietnam, when luke-warm-to-the-war governments where voted in... they sent more troops over. The number grew at a rate not fast enough to deal with the rise in resistance, as more and more opponents mobalized for the war.
Can the Democrats afford to say "screw it, this is the Republicans many-times-over-screwed-up-war, we wash our hands of it" and pull out?
Can the Democrats afford to send the troop levels that would be needed to win the peace?
I'm not talking about a paultry +30,000 -- I'm talking a total force "boots on the ground" strength of 300,000 to 1 million or more, plus a like number of reserves to keep tours of duty down.
300,000 is one American troop for every 100 Iraqis.
1 million is one American troop for every 25 Iraqis.
At the end of WW2, Germany had 60 million people, 43 of which where in West Germany.
The Allied main army had 1,300,000 active men -- or one man for every 46 Germans, or one man for every 33 West Germans.
I don't have enough information on the occupation force used in Germany.
To match this ratio, the Americans would need 780,000 men in Iraq. They currently have about 100,000.
In addition, there was a massive shortage of people of active age in Germany at that time. Most of them had been killed in the war. Really, we should examine the ratio of occupation troops to "males between the ages of 16 to 35".
...
I suppose great strides could be made by cleaning out the corruption in the Iraqi reconstruction. But I'm not sure if it would work without a serious commitment to boots on the ground...