Former Iraq administrator Paul Bremer has recently stated that the lack of sufficient troops in Iraq led to widespread looting, destruction of utility systems, hospitals and other public services, and helped create an environment of lawlessness that exists to this day.
The standard response of George W. Bush has been to say that military commanders never asked for more troops. After what happened to Gen. Eric Shinseki when he testified that "several" hundred thousand troops would be needed in Iraq, what military commander would be foolish enough to ask for more troops
Gen. Shinseki was a four-star general and Army Chief of Staff, but that was not enough to protect him from being humiliated. Because his testimony was not consistent with the policy of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to have a war "on the cheap," deploying as few troops as possible, Shinseki took early retirement in order to avoid further shabby treatment by Pentagon civilians. If this wasn't enough, Shinseki contradicted Dick Cheney's statement that American troops would be greeted "with flowers and sweets," which turned out to be a figment of Ahmad Chalabi's vivid imagination.
Generals in the United States Army are intelligent, well-trained professionals who are entirely familiar with how advancement in the military occurs. One way it never happens is to tick off the Secretary of Defense and his civilian staff. Accordingly, it is monumental hypocrisy to say more troops weren't sent to Iraq because military commanders didn't ask for them. What general would be willing to court professional suicide?
The Defense Department now says troop levels in Iraq weren't Bremer's business. What the DOD is really saying is that it was Bremer's responsibility to create a stable Iraq, but that they had the authority to determine what resources Bremer had at his disposal. This suggests Bremer was set up to fall. He would build a new electric power plant that would be destroyed by insurgents because there weren't enough troops to protect it, but it was Bremer's fault, not the military's. We should extend our sympathy to Paul Bremer for having been cynically used by the Bush administration
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