Iraq War: Could this excuse be true?

"I think we are winning.  Okay?  I think we're definitely winning.  I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.

From Shortage of troops in Iraq a `grim warning' by Tom Lasseter, McClatchy Newspapers 07/27/06:

Almost no high-ranking, active-duty U.S. officers are willing to discuss their concerns about troop levels publicly, for fear of being reprimanded or having their careers cut short. There's an unwritten understanding, they said, that the Bush administration doesn't want to hear about the need for more troops.

The top American military officer in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., has said that such assertions are untrue. When ground commanders ask for more troops, according to Casey, they get them.

Casey "can get any forces anytime he wants to ask for them. General Casey has never been limited by the secretary of defense," said Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq. "To accomplish the missions that we are attempting to achieve, we do have the force structure that we need."

We know that a number of senior officers thought that more troops were needed.  And it's no secret how that game works: the generals know they should give the civilian officials the cover of not asking formally for more troops than the civilian plan to give.  That's not to say that's the right way to do things.  But that's often how it's done.  And there a lot of reasons to assume that the same thing happened with the Iraq War.

But these repeated claims that the military is getting everything they asked for will be worth remembering once the US has left the Iraq War and the stab-in-the-back crew are frantically claiming that the generals were being forced to fight "with one hand tied behind their backs" and so forth.

Really?  Then why was there such consistent agreement among the Cheney-Bush officials and the senior serving officers that all the troops and equipment that were needed were being provided?

"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05