Jack K. in Ruminate This on the
way US National Guard units and reservists are treated due to the clusterfuck in Iraq:
…it could probably be argued far into the night whether more troops on the ground from the outset would have forstalled the current combat. Many current and former military leaders insisted that we should have had twice as many troops for peacekeeping than Rummy and his gang would allow. Nothing that has happened over the past few months would suggest that they didn’t know what they were talking about, while every evidence indicates that the Bushie boys hadn’t even a glimmer of an idea of what was needed to make this ill-advised little nation-building adventure turn out alright. They appear to have gotten the WMD issue wrong; they got the mood of the Iraqi people wrong; they got the post-war planning wrong (an extremely charitable observation, granting them the assumption that they actually had a plan); they got the costs wrong; they got deBaathification wrong; they got peace-keeping troop strength wrong; they got the handling of nationalistic minor Shiite religious leaders wrong; if they let Chalabi anywhere near the keys to power they will have gotten the creation of the interim government wrong…and because of all of that and so much much more, soldiers and marines who already served one hitch in Iraq during the invasion are being faced with redeployment and Reservists and Guardsmen who thought they would be gone for a year are now looking having to complete a 20-month deployment before they can go home. Hopefully no copies of “Catch-22” get loose within the ranks; reading Heller’s book might be enough to make some folks just start walking home.
Extended tours of duty are arguably worse for those Reservists and Guardspeople than for regular soldiers, since the former have jobs and responsibilities outside of the Army. How welcoming will their bosses be when they finally get back from Iraq, after an absence of 17? 24? more months from their jobs? Add to that the strain such extended deployments must cause in their families and you’re looking at one bunch of unhappy soldiers. It’s one thing to know you’ll have to give up a year of your life to Bush’s folly, quite another to be effectively on a permanent mission, with no idea when you’ll get to go back. If they extended one deadline, they could extend it again.