Anyone Else Feel Like Saying I Told You So?

A new Pentagon funded study has found that the Army is, in fact, stretched to the breaking point. The second paragraph of the story says two important things.

Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer who wrote the report under a Pentagon contract, concluded that the Army cannot sustain the pace of troop deployments to Iraq long enough to break the back of the insurgency.

To put into plain language, unless we change the path we are on, we have lost this war. This is something that you will not hear anyone in the administration or the Army say in public. That is why the second half of this paragraph is interesting. We are being told that the situation in Iraq has evolved to the point that we can start to come home, this other reason can not be found anywhere.

He also suggested that the Pentagon's decision, announced in December, to begin reducing the force in Iraq this year was driven in part by a realization that the Army was overextended.

We will start to pull troop levels down because there are elections in 9 months, and because the Army is unable to sustain this level of deployment, but we will be told it is because the situation is improving. Just more spin and dishonesty coming from a group who used these tools to get us into this war.

Many of those opposed the war in Iraq are not anti-war, they were anti-this war. Before the first shots were fired it was clear to me that the risks far outweighed the benefits, that Saddam presented no real threat to this country, a that our chance of success in the long term was almost nil.

Those pushing for the war tried to scare us with mushroom clouds, germ spraying ultra lights, and sarin gas coming from the air conditioner. They promised greetings with roses, a cost under twenty billion dollars, and a jolly good romp in the sand for the lads in green.

Reality verses fantasy, and we see what believing in fantasy had brought us.


UPDATE
Rumsfeld has slithered out from under his rock to assure us that, "the force is not broken.". Of course, this is coming from one of those who were spinning such wonderful lies about what a threat Iraq was, and how they people would welcome us with open arms, so there is no reason to questions his veracity.

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Iraq Krepinevich