(no subject)

[jfb]

Hey, does anyone else remember how some of the people who opposed an invasion of Iraq worried that it was a distraction from more pressing matters like North Korea and the hunt for Al Qaeda? And how war proponents like Donald Rumsfeld said, "Oh, pish-tosh!" (I'm paraphrasing.) "The American military can do more than one thing at a time!"

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, several West African countries, and Britain and France have called on the United States to take the lead in a peacekeeping operation in Liberia, which was established by freed American slaves in 1822. But the Pentagon is reluctant to stretch its military resources even thinner when it has more than 200,000 troops in the Persian Gulf region and about 10,000 in Afghanistan.

In case you're wondering what "even thinner" means:

The Army now has more than half of its 10-division active duty force assigned to Iraq. There is the equivalent of another division deployed in Afghanistan, and two to three are typically kept in reserve for a potential confrontation with North Korea. And, because the Army likes to keep three or four divisions training and preparing to eventually replace each division in action, the Pentagon at the moment has no troops to replace many of those on extended deployments in Iraq.

Comments

[greyaenigma.livejournal.com]

I think maybe what he meant was "Pish-tosh, we don't care about those other things."

[(Anonymous)]

Does anybody else remember that some people were against going into Iraq without the Administration laying out a plan for what to do once we got there?