Of all of Bush’s misstatements from the 2000 presidential election, one of the most obviously-false attacks was on military readiness. Indeed, then-Gov. Bush blamed Clinton and Gore directly for “hollowing out” the military. “If called on by the commander-in-chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report, ‘Not ready for duty, sir.'” BC00 campaign aides later acknowledged it was a bogus charge, but that didn’t stop Bush from repeating it. A lot.
And now, seven years later, the next batch of Republican presidential hopefuls are doing the same thing.
Here’s the top story out of Iowa: Rudy Giuliani told an audience at Iowa State University that the American military needs to be bigger, and he lashed out at Bill Clinton for cutting the military during the 1990’s.
“Our military is too small to deal with the Islamic terrorism threats,” Giuliani said, “but it really is too small to deter would-be aggressors to even think of challenging us. And that’s due to Bill Clinton.”
Does this make any sense? What threats are we incapable of dealing with? And if they exist, why hasn’t Bush/Cheney done anything about it? We already spend more on the military than most of the world put together — who else does Giuliani want to invade? (Oh wait, don’t answer that.)
Giuliani made a similar argument a couple of months ago, insisting that “the biggest mistake [Bill Clinton] ever made doesn’t get the focus it deserves — and that is gutting our military.”
Fred Thompson argued along the same lines, insisting that the U.S. must rebuild its military to fight global terrorism because leaders “took a holiday” in the 1990s.
Look, I realize the GOP is in a bind. Bush has stretched the military to the breaking point, and Republican presidential candidates want to emphasize rebuilding the Armed Forces as part of their platforms. But to acknowledge the incredible strains on the current military is to implicitly hold the president to account for his irresponsible policies.
What to do? Blame Clinton, of course.
Nonsensical rhetoric notwithstanding, Giuliani and Thompson have identified the correct problem, but they’re blaming the wrong president.
Four years after the invasion of Iraq, the high and growing demand for U.S. troops there and in Afghanistan has left ground forces in the United States short of the training, personnel and equipment that would be vital to fight a major ground conflict elsewhere, senior U.S. military and government officials acknowledge.
More troubling, the officials say, is that it will take years for the Army and Marine Corps to recover from what some officials privately have called a “death spiral,” in which the ever more rapid pace of war-zone rotations has consumed 40 percent of their total gear, wearied troops and left no time to train to fight anything other than the insurgencies now at hand.
The risk to the nation is serious and deepening, senior officers warn, because the U.S. military now lacks a large strategic reserve of ground troops ready to respond quickly and decisively to potential foreign crises…. An immediate concern is that critical Army overseas equipment stocks for use in another conflict have been depleted by the recent troop increases in Iraq, they said.
“We have a strategy right now that is outstripping the means to execute it,” Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday.
Remember, Bush sought the presidency on a military-readiness platform and, for reasons that defy comprehension, believes we’re still well prepared.
The Army’s vice chief of staff, Gen. Richard A. Cody, described as “stark” the level of readiness of Army units in the United States, which would be called on if another war breaks out. “The readiness continues to decline of our next-to-deploy forces,” Cody told the House Armed Services Committee’s readiness panel last week. “And those forces, by the way, are . . . also your strategic reserve.”
Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked last month by a House panel whether he was comfortable with the preparedness of Army units in the United States. He stated simply: “No … I am not comfortable.”
I’d just add that Clinton fought two wars — and won them both. What’s more, when Bush sent troops into Afghanistan to rout the Taliban, he did so with the military Clinton left for him.
And yet, Giuliani, among others, now wants a bigger military, so we can fight more wars. Podhoretz really is giving Giuliani quite an education, isn’t he?