The One and Only Reason There Are Not MORE U.S. Troops in Iraq

[babylonsister]

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/28323

The One and Only Reason There Are Not MORE U.S. Troops in Iraq
Submitted by davidswanson on Fri, 2007-11-02 03:01. Nonviolent Resistance

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"It's going to be another tough recruiting year," the four-star general said.

Making it even tougher is the decline in what the Army calls its delayed entry pool, which is the group of enlistees who have signed contracts to join the Army but want to wait before shipping off to basic training. Normally the Army tries to start its recruiting year with a delayed entry pool equal to about 25 percent of its full-year goal, which in this case would equate to 20,000 recruits.

Instead, the Army began with 7,392 recruits, or about 9 percent of its full-year goal.

Last year at this time the Army was beginning its recruiting year with 12,062, or about 15 percent.

Wallace attributed the decline in the number of pre-signed recruits to the Army's decision last summer to begin offering a "quick ship" bonus of $20,000 to recruits willing to leave for basic training by the end of September. For some recruits that bonus is the equivalent of a year's pay.

The bonus program, which began July 25, was part of a last-minute push by the Army to meet its year-end recruiting goal, after having fallen short on recruiting numbers in May and June. It had the effect of getting many of the recruits who signed up after July 25 into basic training sooner than they would have otherwise, thus reducing the number with entry dates after Oct. 1.

"That is of concern for us because the delayed entry program gives us guaranteed enlistees to meter out across the year," Wallace said. Without that cushion to begin the recruiting year, recruiters are going to have to sign up enough people to meet the existing goal as well as replenish the pool for next year.

more...

[pnwmom]

1. If we had a draft we would have far more soldiers getting killed there.

And yet many people keep promoting the idea that a draft will end the war. They don't seem to understand that we had a draft during Vietnam, but the war didn't end until more than 50,000 US soldiers died.

[BeHereNow]

2. Good luck Mr. Wallace...our youth may be ignorant, but they aint dumb.

No one in their right mind is going to VOLUNTEER to go
to Iraq, especially with the lunatics beating the drums on IRAN.
Just ask the diplomats who refuse to staff the embassy there.
:rofl:
Now whatcha gonna do BFEE?
Recruit some more South Americans?
Offer them citizenship in a failing country and economy?
Heh!!!
The empire is falling.
Too bad it's going to land on the rest of us.
BHN

[babylonsister]

3. Hell, our diplomats don't wanna go there! Why would anyone? nt

[mvccd1000]

4. Well, maybe not the ONLY reason....

.... I would hope that us contractors who fix the trucks, install the armor, and run the warehouses enable SOME soldiers who would otherwise be here doing the work to stay home instead.

[WilliamPitt]

5. Don't forget Saudi Arabia and the royals...

...who are long-time Bush-family business partners...

...and financiers of Saudi fighters who have joined Iraq's Sunni militias armed with Saudi-bought RPGs to shoot down US helicopters...

...and owners of roughly 11% of the US economy, including a fair piece of CNN's TimeWarner parent...

...and deeply vested in the Unocal project to tap the vast resevoirs of natural gas in Turkmenistan by the Caspian Sea, which required a pipeline running from the Caspian through Afghanistan and into a warm-water port off India...

...but the Taliban government since 1996 repeatedly rejected Unocal/Saudi/US enticements and refused to have the pipeline cross their lands...

...which stopped being a problem after some Saudi Wahabbists took a plane ride with some Egyptian hard-cases to New York and DC and Pennsylvania, because after that happened, the Taliban got bombed out of power (termprarily) and the pipeline got built and everybody's happy...

...right?

But anyway...

I think Rumsfeld limited the number of deployed troops because the Saudis are still dealing with the fallout from their decision to ally with the 500,000-troop force that sat in the sand near Mecca and Medina for a while in '91, and then attacked Iraq in what turned out to be a 20-minute war that still hasn't ended.

The Wahabbists are still pissed at the royals for allowing Western soldiers to desecrate the land of Mohammed's revelations, the land of their two most sacred cities...and the Wahabbists are not people you want pissed at you, so I'd bet Rummy got a call: "Keep it small, OK?"

That worked out well...not that it'd have worked out any better with 300,000 troops, or 400,000, or a million. Urban warfare is urban warfare, civil war is civil war, and more troops would only have been more targets.

JMHO.