They’re Extending Combat Tours in Iraq Again
by Ian Mosley
Memo to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney: If you’re going to start a war of imperial conquest to make the world safe for Israel, make sure you have enough troops BEFORE you invade. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “The Army is considering whether it will have to extend the combat tours of troops in Iraq if President Bush opts to maintain the recent buildup of forces through spring 2008.Acting Army Secretary Pete Geren testified Tuesday that the service is reviewing other options, including relying more heavily on Army reservists or Navy and Air Force personnel, so as not to put more pressure on a stretched active-duty force.”
Let’s see now. In order to raise the endless columns of cannon fodder necessary to fulfill the neocons’ ambitions, the Army and Marines have lowered enlistment aptitude and intelligence standards to the point where an orangutan could join. They have lowered moral and criminal standards until Al Capone could qualify as an officer candidate. They have lowered drug testing and drug-free requirements until our guys in Iraq might find themselves commanded by Sergeant Cheech and Lieutenant Chong. They have raised the enlistment age to 42. So a few middle-aged men who lost their jobs to down-sizing can now have an arm blown off while patrolling Fallujah. I can imagine these elderly recruits checking their pacemakers and taking their high blood pressure medicine before they charge the Iraqi insurgent machine guns. They have violated the Pentagon’s own guidelines by extending the standard combat tour in Iraq to fifteen months in country and (allegedly) twelve stateside…but now they’re fiddling with even that.
First of all, the so-called “temporary surge” is really a permanent ESCALATION. That lovely term that was so popular during the early years of the Vietnam War. The Chronicle notes “Gen. David Petraeus, Iraq war commander, on Sunday suggested that conditions on the ground might not be stable enough by September to justify a drop in force levels and predicted that stabilizing Iraq could take as long as a decade. Earlier this year, Bush ordered the deployment of some 30,000 additional troops as part of a massive U.S.-led security push around Baghdad and the western Anbar province….When asked by Sen. Carl Levin whether maintaining the force build up would affect soldiers’ 15-month combat schedules, Geren said he was unsure and cited ‘numerous options’ available, including using a ‘different utilization of the Guard and Reserve’ and relying on the other services for help.”
This could mean shifting people from the Navy and Air Force giving them rifles, and suddenly transforming them into infantry —a tactic usually reserved for the desperate last battle of a collapsing empire.. So much for those kids who thought joining the Navy or Air Force would get them military pay and benefits and college tuition while keeping them out of the meat-grinder in Iraq.
Finally, as one serving Iraq soldier has complained to me personally, the military is doing a disgraceful musical chairs act in order to get around the officially promised and mandated “twelve months at home” stipulation. They are applying that criteria to UNITS, not to individuals. Thousands of guys are arriving home off rotation, and instead of being able to settle in for at least a year at Fort Benning or Fort Lewis, they are then TRANSFERRED TO OTHER OUTFITS–who just happen to be getting on the plane to Baghdad. This is how some men have ended up spending forty-five of the fifty-one months of the war in Iraq and never even completing a full tour, just bits and pieces of tours on paper as the Army keeps shuffling them like a deck of cards in order to keep them in Iraq.
People who join the military have a reasonable expectation that they will only be fighting to protect America. Not one of the thousands of deaths in Iraq was for a good purpose. Not one of the tens of thousands of maimed soldiers lost an arm or leg for a good reason. We are occupying Iraq because paranoid little Israel wants us there suppressing the Iraqis for all time.