To say I was astounded by the Chicago Tribune’s Dec. 26 editorial “Do we need a bigger Army?” would be a substantial understatement.
First, it tacitly complimented the Clinton administration when it referred to our pre-Iraq Army as being “prepared to handle with ease any challenge that could possibly arise,” with its top personnel and “state-of-the-art weapons and equipment” and “vast resources.” This refutes the oft-heard claim from the right that our current military shortfall can be traced to the prior president.
Second, it tacitly acknowledges that the miscalculation by the current president has led to the intense strain on our forces today. Interestingly it ignores its own role as a cheerleader for this misadventure.
But these tacit statements are really only peripheral to the amazing statement it makes about whether we could even get a bigger Army. It notes that it would take five years to increase our current force from 507,000 to 540,000 troops, and that there is no assurance that we could do this at all.
What makes this so astonishing is that the Tribune regularly asserts that it is some deficiency within the Iraq government that has kept that nation from replacing our 140,000 troops with trained Iraqi forces over the last three-plus years. We can’t be expected to find, train and equip 33,000 American troops here in less than five years, but they expect a war-ravaged and much smaller Iraq to find, train and equip more than four times that many soldiers in just over half the time?
This fundamental failure to recognize and acknowledge facts and reality lies at the heart of the failure of the Bush administration and its enabling media outlets like the Tribune.
