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General says army short on money for Iraq

A US helicopter takes off from the fortified Green Zone in Baghdad on Monday. In a new sign of mounting strain from the war, the US Army has extended the combat tours of approximately 4,000 soldiers who would otherwise have been returning home. PHOTO: AP

US President George W. Bush suffered a serious rebuke of his wartime leadership on Monday when his army chief said he did not have enough money to fight the war in Iraq.

Six weeks before mid-term elections in which the war will be a crucial issue, the protest from the army head, General Peter Schoomaker, exposes concerns within the US military about the strain of the war on Iraq, and growing tensions between uniformed personnel and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Three retired senior military officers accused Rumsfeld on Monday of bungling the war on Iraq, and said the Pentagon was "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically." Major General Paul Eaton, a retired officer who was in charge of training Iraq troops, chimed in.

"Rumsfeld and his immediate team must be replaced or we will see two more years of extraordinarily bad decision-making," he said.

The rare criticism from the three officers -- all veterans of the Iraq war -- is an embarrassment to Bush at a time when his party had hoped to campaign on its strong leadership in the "war on terror."

The officers echoed the findings of the National Intelligence Estimate at the weekend, which said the Iraq war had fueled Islamist extremism around the world.

They also accused the Pentagon of putting soldiers' lives at risk by failing to provide the best equipment available.

"Why are we asking our soldiers and marines to use the same armor we found was insufficient in 2003?" asked Thomas Hammes, a retired Marine Corps colonel.

The criticism comes amid an unprecedented show of defiance from the army chief, General Schoomaker.

The seriousness of the protest was underlined by Schoomaker's reputation as an ally of the Pentagon chief. The general had come out of retirement at Rumsfeld's request to take up the post.

"It's quite a debacle," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute thinktank. "Virtually everyone in the army feels as though their needs have been shortchanged."

Schoomaker's defiance gives a voice to growing concern within the military about the costs of the US' wars and the long-term strain of carrying out operations around the world.

For the past three years, the US$400 billion cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been funded by emergency spending bills passed by Congress.

But Schoomaker and others say the Iraq war has also put a severe strain on regular budgets.

That puts the generals at odds with Rumsfeld's strategic vision of a more nimble, hi-tech military. In addition, Congress and the White House have cut a number of army spending requests over the past months.

As the war in Iraq continues with no sign of a reduction in US forces, military officials have repeatedly complained about the strain on personnel, and say they fear they may be forced to rely more heavily on the National Guard and reservists to meet the demands of overseas deployments.

General John Abizaid, the US senior commander in the Middle East, said last week there was little chance of any drawing down of the 140,000 forces in Iraq before next spring.

The burden of that commitment was underlined on Monday when the army extended the combat tours of about 4,000 soldiers.
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