Tuesday, 18 May 2004

The hollow men. Fester at Fester's Place beat me to this by a few hours, but he and I had the same "eating the seed corn" reaction to this news: Bush is purportedly drawing up plans to deploy the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment — the regiment permanently stationed at the National Training Center, and by all accounts deliverers of the most effective combat training that any army has ever received — to Iraq.

Bush is hollowing out the United States Army. Whether by conscious choice or by the path of least resistance, he is effectively abandoning South Korea: If a million starving North Korean conscripts start massing along the 38th parallel, we no longer have the resources even on paper to mount a conventional repsonse. But mothballing the National Training Center is worse than even that: It would do long-term damage to the efficiency of our combat troops.

The Bush administration's track record is one of military success and political failure: Of political leaders failing to capitalize on military triumphs, and of questionable orders from the top that have led us to chaos and disgrace. Bush's team, not our armed forces, was responsible for planning to keep the peace with only 130,000 troops, for disbanding the Iraqi army, for creating a powerless Iraqi government and then discrediting it, and for creating conditions at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib that encouraged (if not ordered) American soldiers to violate the Geneva Convention. Sending OPFOR to Iraq would be another sign of desperation from an administration whose post-war Iraq plans have exploded in all our faces — and a sign that Bush's regard for our soldiers, and our long-term security, is held hostage to his election plans.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 11:51 pm. comments.