U.S. Army Will Need Years To Recover From Bush’S Iraq Schemes, Admits Army Chief

‘The Army is unraveling,’ and ‘as a result, the country is in a position of strategic peril,’ say U.S. military leaders.U.S. Army Will Need Years To Recover From Bush’s Iraq Schemes, Admits Army ChiefBy Cliff Montgomery – Oct. 9th, 2007The U.S. Army is going to need up to four years to rebuild its forces thanks to the unnecessary nation-building of Iraq, admitted the service’s chief on Monday.General George Casey told reporters that the American army is “out of balance” after more than five years in Iraq, and added that U.S. forces must now deal with what appears to be a time of “persistent conflict.””Out of balance is not broken, it’s not hollow,” he claimed.”We know where we need to go and it’s going to take three or four years and a substantial amount of resources to put ourselves back in balance,” he stated at an army conference.But the truth is almost certainly much worse than General Casey–a Bush Administration representative–is  willing to admit. As a May story in revealed, George W. Bush’s troop “surge” of some 35,000 men in addition to the 140,000 already deployed in Iraq has created howls, particularly among America’s military leaders, that the U.S. Army now in fact is over-stretched and fast becoming “broken”.A growing number of senior retired officers–some of whom had first expressed optimism that America’s active-duty force of some 500,000 troops could handle Bush’s “global war on terror”– now say our military strength hasn’t been this weak since 1980, when the country’s top soldier, Gen. Edward Meyer, publicly declared that America had a “hollow Army”.”The active army is about broken,” former Secretary of State Colin Powell–who also served as chairman of the Armed Forces Joint Chiefs of Staff under the first President Bush–was quoted as saying in the April issue of Time magazine.Another highly decorated retired general who has returned from Iraq and Afghanistan referred to the situation in even more dire terms.”The truth is, the U.S. Army is in serious trouble and any recovery will be years in the making and, as a result, the country is in a position of strategic peril,” ret. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, former head of the U.S. Southern Command, told The National Journal.McCaffrey also penned a much-cited memo concerning the current Army crisis for his colleagues at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.”My bottom line is that the Army is unraveling, and if we don’t expend significant national energy to reverse that trend, sometime in the next two years we will break the Army just like we did during Vietnam,” he added.The U.S. Army had to suffer through added strains earlier this year, after George W. Bush insisted on a U.S. troop “surge” in Iraq which he hoped would lessen the spiraling sectarian violence in the country.To fill the troop demand, the U.S. Army has extended the combat tours of American soldiers in Iraq from 12 months to 15 months.The only other option? Deploying units which have had less than 12 months to rest and re-train before their next taste of combat.Army Secretary Pete Geren admitted to reporters that it’s “impossible to predict” just how long  the U.S. Army will be forced to rely on these extended tours of duty in Iraq.Casey claimed that the current 15-month tours were merely “temporary.””We are in the midst of analyzing that and the impact on our ability to come off a 15 month deployment,” he claimed.But such “temporary” deployments also keep army units from training for any other matter than Bush’s misadventure than Iraq.We must remind readers here that the reasons for Bush’s Iraq nation-building–it is not a war–were proven to be little better than lies and wishful thinking.This reporter’s May 2003 article for the online webzine Alternet.org revealed that Bush’s claims of still-viable chemical and biological weapons stores in Iraq were a tissue of outright lies.Also in 2003, Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker Magazine verified that the same deliberate lies were fostered about Iraq’s non-existent nuclear weapon program.Lastly, the claims of ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were similarly proven to be based more on wishful thinking and half-truths than facts.Therefore any other excuse for further U.S. troop deployment stems from the rhetorical trick of the “special pleading”–a logical fallacy in which the speaker continually claims fresh, unfounded reasons for maintaining a certain position, long after the original reasons for holding the position are proven false.We thus are allowing this “Mayberry Machiavelli” to break our army–the best since the days of Napoleon–on a web of political vanity, deceit and special pleadings.And this reporter won’t even get into what such lies have done to both our troops or to innocent Iraqi citizens.God forgive us.Like what you’re reading so far? Then why not order a full year (52 issues) of thee-newsletter for only $15? A major article covering an story not being told in the Corporate Press will be delivered to your email every Monday morning for a full year, for less than 30 cents an issue. Order Now!