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Eric Shinseki on War & Peace
Secretary of Veterans Affairs-Designee
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OpEd: Calling for 300,000 in Iraq applies Powell Doctrine
The Powell Doctrine has always made sense to me. If you're going to engage in a military action, do it with overwhelming force so that failure simply isn't an option. The notion of an "occupation with a light footprint," which was our original paradigm
for Iraq, always struck me as a contradiction in terms. Liberating a country and occupying it are two different missions. Occupying a country, to me, inevitably demands a lot of boots on the ground. Instead of marginalizing former Army chief of staff
Gen. Eric Shinseki when he said we needed several hundred thousand troops for Iraq, I would have met privately with him and carefully weighed his advice and his underlying analysis.We had a military strategy in place to topple the regime of Saddam
Hussein, but we did not have a realistic political strategy of how to turn the culture of a totalitarian nation like Iraq into a democracy overnight. Our original armed forces weren't large enough, and we have worn out our National Guard and our reserves
Source: Do The Right Thing, by Mike Huckabee, p. 12
, Nov 18, 2008
2003: Iraq success requires several hundred thousand troops
"Something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers."
--Gen. Eric Shinseki, on how many troops would be needed in Iraq, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Feb. 25, 2003"We can say with reasonable confidence that the
notion of hundreds of thousands of American troops is way off the mark."
--Paul Wolfowitz, Feb. 27, 2003
"The idea that it would take several hundred thousand US forces I think is far off the mark."
-- Donald Rumsfeld,
Feb. 28, 2003
"We don't have enough troops. We don't control the terrain."
--Colin Powell, to George W. Bush and Tony Blair, Nov. 12, 2004
"In my weeks in Iraq,
I did not meet a single military officer who felt, privately, that we had enough troops."
--Coalition Provisional Authority adviser Larry Diamond, in a memo to Condoleezza Rice, April 26, 2004
Source: The War in Quotes, by G.B. Trudeau, p. 42-43
, Oct 1, 2008
2003: Undercut for disagreeing with White House on Iraq
After the tragedy of Vietnam, the US military made an impressive commitment to learning everything it could from the experience. Unfortunately, the Pentagon was forced to discard many of thee lessons during its preparations for invading Iraq.
For example, the size of the US invasion force, we now know, was far smaller than military experts had recommended. In February 2003, before the war began, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki told
Congress that the occupation could require several hundred thousand troops, but the White House had already decided that a much smaller force was adequate. Rather than engaging in a reasoned debate on the question, they undercut
Shinseki for disagreeing with their preconceived notion--even though he was an expert and they were not.
The other generals and admirals got the message and stopped expressing disagreement with the White House. Shinseki had been right, of course.
Source: The Assault on Reason, by Al Gore, p.113-114
, Jul 1, 2008
Ridiculed for testifying that Iraq needed greater manpower
Too few of the uniformed leaders of the American military spoke out against what many believed was a terribly flawed plan to go to war in Iraq. There were courageous exceptions. General Eric Shinseki, chief-of-staff of the Army, testified to
Congress that the military would need far greater manpower than we had planned for in order to achieve our objectives in Iraq. He was publicly humiliated by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, and left dangling and neutered over the last 12 months of his tenure.
Source: Our Next Chapter, by Chuck Hagel, p. 58-59
, Mar 25, 2008
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