"BUFDRVR" wrote in message
...

snip

Ignoring the estimate of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in Feb, 2003.
Gen.
Shinseki said "several hundred thousand" US troops would be needed. The
Bushies just ignored that -- it didn't fit the plan.

Yeah, the Bush administration was the first ever adminstration to ignore
advice
from the military. This was a mistake, but hardly unique. Clinton ignored
the
advice of the military in Somalia in 1993 and got dozens of Americans
killed in
the process. I'm willing to bet you were silent on that one.

Actually, the original poster's (Bufdrvr, you really need to stop snipping
the poster ID info from the top of all of your posts--gets a bit hard to
figure who said what) premise is screwed up a bit from the get-go. First,
Shinseki was not the CJCS when he made that comment--he was the
former/retired CS of the Army (and one with an axe to grind regarding his
former superiors, given his quick "don't let the door hit you in the ass on
the way out" departure). Second, it is interesting that even now we are not
considering "several hundred thousand" US troops be deployed into Iraq, but
instead are merely delaying the previously planned reduction in the number
of deployed troops (the total is still in the 130K range for the US Army,
IIRC, despite our having to take on the additional load of the former
Spanish contingent after Spain's rapid capitulation to terrorists; total
troops deployed in the entire CENTCOM region, from all forces, is about 225K
max, with a chunk of them operating in Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa,
and including those still operating in Kuwait, Qatar, etc.). Shinseki's
flawed vision of the vast number of US troops required never has received a
great deal of support from *any* quarter other than that of John McCain
(another fellow with a bit of an anti-Bush axe to grind).

Brooks

snip