Retired Generals on the broken army and illusions of the Iraq war

[ProSense]

From Talking Points:

COMMENTARY IN RECENT days from two retired Army generals, Barry McCaffrey and William Odom, gives an even greater sense of urgency to the need to change course in Iraq.

McCaffrey says the U.S. needs to bring home five brigades from Iraq before Christmas to keep the Army from breaking, a redeployment he concedes is not feasible, according to the Army Times:

“The country is not at war. The United States armed forces and the CIA are at war. So we are asking our military to sustain a level of effort that we have not resourced,” he told Army Times.

“That’s how to break the Army is to keep it deployed above the rate at which it can be sustained,” he said. “There’s no free lunch here. The Army and the Marine Corps and Special Operations Command are too small and badly resourced to carry out this national security strategy.”

Odom is equally gloomy:

Our leaders do not act because their reputations are at stake. The public does not force them to act because it is blinded by the president's conjured set of illusions: that we are reducing terrorism by fighting in Iraq, creating democracy there, preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, making Israel more secure, not allowing our fallen soldiers to have died in vain, and others.

But reality no longer can be avoided. It is beyond U.S. power to prevent sectarian violence in Iraq, the growing influence of Iran throughout the region, the probable spread of Sunni-Shiite strife to neighboring Arab states, the eventual rise to power of the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr or some other anti-American leader in Baghdad, and the spread of instability beyond Iraq.

These realities get worse every day that our forces remain in Iraq. They can't be wished away by clever diplomacy or by leaving our forces in Iraq for several more years.

Meanwhile the President is focused on mislearning the lessons of Vietnam.