Why Bush Won't Send More Troops

Virtually every independent analyst who does not want to withdraw from Iraq thinks we need more troops in order to win. Republicans at the Weekly Standard have said this. Democrats such as Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware have said this. The troops themselves say this, incessantly. A dearth of boots on the ground results in such predicaments as an inability to patrol the border where enemy fighters are swarming in, or the need to repeatedly fight for the same towns, which we lack the forces to occupy continuously.

But President Bush doesn't think we need more soldiers. Comically, he also insists that in not sending more troops he is merely obeying the wishes of the 'commanders on the ground.'

It may be literally true that the generals are telling Bush they don't need more troops. But if it is, that's only because they know they have no choice but to say so.

At the beginning of the war, Gen. Eric Shinseki privately challenged Defense Department troop estimates for occupying Iraq as too low. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was enraged and leaked the name of Shinseki's successor to the media a year before the end of his term as Army chief of staff, thereby making him a lame duck. Last May, the Baltimore Sun reported that, based on a flimsy pretext, Maj. Gen. John Riggs was stripped of one of his three stars just before retirement for more publicly insisting that the military needed more troops.

The President likes to say he's asked the generals if we need more troops on the ground. He doesn't say their careers are destroyed if they give the wrong answer. No wonder the war's going so poorly. its being run by people that never had to fight for anything a day in their lives.