Looking back, one of the more disturbing moments from the president’s prime-time press conference came in response to a question about military readiness.
Q: Do you feel that the number of troops that you’ve kept there is limiting your options elsewhere in the world? Just today you had the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency say that he was now concerned that the North Koreans, for example, could put a weapon, a nuclear weapon on a missile that could reach Japan or beyond. Do you feel, as you are confronting these problems, the number of troops you’ve left tied up in Iraq is limiting your options to go beyond the diplomatic solutions that you described for North Korea and Iran?
Bush: No, I appreciate that question. The person to ask that to, the person I ask that to, at least, is to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, my top military advisor. I say, do you feel that we’ve limited our capacity to deal with other problems because of our troop levels in Iraq? And the answer is, no, he doesn’t feel we’re limited. He feels like we’ve got plenty of capacity.
Maybe the president heard what he wanted to hear, or perhaps Bush simply misunderstood the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but one thing’s for sure: Gen. Richard Myers gave a very different answer to Congress about our ability to deal with a military conflict should a crisis arise.
The concentration of American troops and weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan limits the Pentagon’s ability to deal with other potential armed conflicts, the military’s highest ranking officer reported to Congress on Monday.
The officer, Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, informed Congress in a classified report that major combat operations elsewhere in the world, should they be necessary, would probably be more protracted and produce higher American and foreign civilian casualties because of the commitment of Pentagon resources in Iraq and Afghanistan. […]
General Myers cited reduced stockpiles of precision weapons, which were depleted during the invasion of Iraq, and the stress on reserve units, which fulfill the bulk of combat support duties in Iraq, as among the factors that would limit the Pentagon’s ability to prevail as quickly as war planners once predicted in other potential conflicts.
The news wasn’t all bad. Though our armed forces are at a higher level of risk and are being pushed to their limit, Myers added that we remain “fully capable” of winning a major combat operation, should one be necessary. One official told reporters we’d succeed in any conflict, but “it wouldn’t be as pretty.”
Politically, however, the real interest is the contradiction between what Bush told the nation last week and what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs told Congress this week. The president was unequivocal that the military’s capacity is not limited — as Bush put it, “[W]e got plenty of capacity” — while General Myers’ report was equally clear that the opposite is true.
The Pentagon said there is no incongruity.
Late Monday, a Pentagon official dismissed any serious contradiction between the president and the general. “The two comments are consistent in that no one in the military feels at all limited in the ability to respond to any contingency,” the official said. “What the risk assessment discusses is the nature of the response.”
That’s a reasonable spin, but it’s wholly unpersuasive. When the Joint Chiefs says the military’s capabilities are limited and the president says they’re not, there’s a problem. Pentagon spin aside, the question at the press conference wasn’t about responding to any contingency.
And just as an aside, who do you suppose leaked Myers’ report to the NYT and the Washington Post? Someone at the Pentagon who wanted to make Bush look bad, perhaps?