Army chief tells Bush: there's not enough money for Iraq war

I've searched the New York Times and the Washington Post and am amazed that neither seems to have any link to the news that General Peter Schoomaker has declared that his army does not have enough money to fight the Iraq war.

This comes on top of three retired senior military officers who have said that Donald Rumsfeld has bungled the war in Iraq and that the Pentagon was "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically".

Major General Paul Eaton, a retired officer who was in charge of training Iraq troops, said: "Mr Rumsfeld and his immediate team must be replaced or we will see two more years of extraordinarily bad decision-making."

This is happening as Mr Bush prepares to fight the mid term elections on the back of his "strong leadership" in the war on terror.

It also follows a report yesterday, the National Intelligence Estimate, which stated that "the invasion of Iraq has created a flood of new Islamic terrorists and increased the danger to US interests to a higher level than at any time since the 9/11 attacks."

The criticism comes amid an unprecedented show of defiance from the army chief, Gen Schoomaker. The general refused to submit a budget plan for 2008 to Mr Rumsfeld, arguing the military could not continue operations in Iraq and its other missions without additional funds, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday. The seriousness of the protest was underlined by Gen Schoomaker's reputation as an ally of the Pentagon chief. The general came out of retirement at Mr Rumsfeld's request to take up the post.

"It's quite a debacle," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute thinktank. "Virtually everyone in the army feels as though their needs have been shortchanged."

Gen Schoomaker's defiance gives a voice to growing concern within the military about the costs of America's wars, and the long-term strain of carrying out operations around the world.

For the past three years, the $400bn (£210bn) cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been funded by emergency spending bills passed by Congress. But Gen Schoomaker and others say the Iraq war has also put a severe strain on regular budgets. That puts the generals at odds with Mr Rumsfeld's strategic vision of a more nimble, hi-tech military. In addition, Congress and the White House have cut a number of army spending requests over the past months. "There is no sense in us submitting a budget that we can't execute, a broken budget," he told a Washington audience.

It is frankly amazing that the Republicans can have the gall to continue fighting elections on the strength of their war on terror, especially the war in Iraq which has become such a bad news story that it sometimes slips off the front page - such is the monotony of the horror emanating from there. It is simply impossible to keep reporting the same bad news day after day.

And yet, the cold hard facts remain that nearly 7,000 civilians were killed in the past two months alone, a shocking average of some 100 every single day.

Stories that Kofi Annan has declared that Iraq stands on the brink of civil war are easily swept aside such is the torrent of awfulness emanating from the region.

It's almost as if the worse things become in Iraq the more it suits President Bush as the public and the media have switched off. There is only so much horror any of us can stomach.

I mean seriously, how much are we supposed to take?

Increasing numbers of terrorist attacks, the strength of sectarian militias, the growth of organised crime as well as "honour killings" of women from both the Sunni and Shia communities reflect a society utterly out of control. Torture, according to a separate UN report, is now more prevalent than in the darkest days of the Ba'athist dictatorship. A new tactic is for armed groups to turn kidnap victims into suicide bombers - seizing them, booby-trapping their cars without their knowledge, then releasing them only to blow up the vehicles by remote control. News agencies yesterday issued a 24-hour tally of shootings of policemen and civilians, including women, some corpses found beheaded or mutilated, and two US soldiers killed by a roadside bomb. That could have been any day in recent months.

It is only natural that the public should grow tired of such a continual bad news story. But it is simply staggering that a political party should be so deeply cynical as to propose selling such a bad new story as a sign of their own strength, safe in the knowledge that the public have turned off from the grim reality.

And yet, that is precisely what the Republicans propose doing. They are going to continue selling the war in Iraq as a sign of their strength, and imply that anyone who opposes them is weak, for the simple reason that - having made the dreadful mistake of invading - there is simply no easy answer to the question of "What to do next?"

By framing the debate as a question of "What do we do now?" they successfully skip the larger and much more relevant question of "Why are we here in the first place?"

Disaster is being sold as victory because the public are too tired to care. For the simple reason that there is only so much horror that people can digest.

For a political party to calculate this and use it as a means of fighting an election campaign is the most cynical thing I think I will ever witness. And yet, that is precisely what they are about to do.

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Tags: Iraq, war, Bush, Rumsfeld, Eaton, Schoomaker, National Intelligence Estimate