The GAO report on military personnel and recruiting goals that I referred to in my previous letter may be found in PDF form here:

http://www.gao.gov/docsearch/app_processform.php

The report is about the sixth one down, on Military Personnel, GAO-06-134, November 17, 2005.

Thanks.

In a commentary on Public Radio's Marketplace on November 23, 2005, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich (Clinton administration) pointed out that a recent GAO report says lagging recruitments and demands for higher pay and benefits for special forces combat troops are stretching the military budget so thin that we will soon be forced to cut our military presence in Iraq, even though the administration pretends that its critics are wrong. You can hear his comment here:

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2005/11/23/AM200511231.html

I didn't look up the GAO report, but it is public information and shouldn't be difficult to find. Reich says we have suffered as much as a 40% decrease in enlistments in certain segments. That is huge. I hope Salon looks at that GAO report and makes use of the data. Looks like bad management will help this administration unravel, and bad management is something on which George W. Bush has become an expert. Heckuva job, W!

[Please pass to Tim Grieve]

Dear Mr. Grieve:

I think you may have missed some of the discussion that is coming both out of the Pentagon and from retired senior officers, as happened on the Lehrer show a couple of days ago. The consensus appears to be that we have to withdraw troops no matter what because (1) we have abused the reservists with multiple and extended tours in Iraq about as much as the country will tolerate, and since Bush won't call for a draft (way too late in the game for that), and since being a reservist has lost a great deal of its appeal in light of the treatment of those sent to Iraq, it is becoming impossible to maintain present strength in Iraq, and (2) as a result of all that, the nation is far too vulnerable to a real threat to its homeland to allow the Iraq adventure to continue at present troop levels.

In short, no amount of politics is going to stop those troops from coming home.

And the reason those Pentagon officers didn't want to speak on the record is that they were leaking stuff the White House didn't want people to be looking at. Bush and Cheney want to exploit the "cut and run" criticism of Democrats as much as they can, even though they know the truth about inevitable withdrawals of troops. They want the Iraq story to be dictated by them and no one else.

So when the Pentagon types tell the truth like this, in what to me is an expression of concurrence with the retired officers being interviewed by the media, it angers the White House because once again it makes it appear that the Bush team was so incompetent it couldn't even keep troops in the field in a war they wanted to prolong (bearing in mind that their original strategy was for a large American garrison to occupy those 14 bases we built for decades to come).

A year ago the White House would be chasing the leakers in the Pentagon with white fury, and Congress would have joined in. No longer. That zeal has been transferred to self-preservation. It is all unraveling, day by day.

Sincerely,

Douglas L. Wilson

Naples, Florida

As philulm stated in his letter, pressure from the Democrats and the waning support of the public are causing the Administration to talk about possible troop withdrawal.

However, overarching all considerations, are the elections next year. I think the Administration, along with prominent Republican lawmakers will do or say anything to keep the elections from being a rout of conservatives in 2006.

The problem is that these people are so dishonest that whatever they do may not be intended to last long. I still believe that there are powerful oil interests in this country that want the US to stay in Iraq for a long time to come.

I doubt that we would be hearing any tentative plans for reducing or redeploying troops in Iraq if it hadn't been for the Democrats taking the Senate into executive session recently. That, coupled with the evaporaton of public support for almost anything this administration tries to do has forced them to content with some real world issues rather than their neocon dreams of world domination. At the same time their words (talking points) continue to represent their alternate reality. I believe that the Democrats must keep the pressure on regarding this war or the Bush neocons will slip back into their dreamland without concern about our troops' welfare. Perhaps, the Senate should hold Alito's nomination hostage to an orderly withdrawal from Iraq.

In their dream of maintaining a new sphere of influence in the Middle East, Bush and the neocons don't EVER plan to leave Iraq. They realize the American public isn't ready for this news (just as it's not ready for their plans to criminalize abortion or end Social Security), but just as we've left troops in Germany ever since WWII, they rely on it becoming a historical inevitability.