Remember when Bush I attacked Iraq it was a hit and run he never entered Baghdad and didn’t stay in the region more than a year with a significantly large force. Bush I was in Iraq before Clinton cut military spending and reduced the army from 18 combat divisions to 10.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, according to Pentagon data as of Jan. 31, 2005, the exact figure was 1,048,884 U.S. soldiers have been deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. That was to maintain a level of 150,000 to 200,000, over 4 years. How many reports have there been about the army being on the verge of collapsing under the strain of multiple deployments. We would have needed over 2.5 million combat ready troops to patrol the streets of Iraq for those four years.

Remember Cheney knew what we would be in for.

Bush II, Cheney and Rumsfeld knew the only strategy, with our limited number of combat troops was to 1: Defeat Saddam’s army and take Baghdad. 2: Set up regional fortified bases of operation to launch attacks on insurgents and terrorist groups from, and retreat back to for safety. 3: Start to build a police force and national army under a provisional authority 4: Start the process of holding elections 5: make a strong push for security to hand over a relatively controllable situation to the newly rebuilt security and police forces. They knew it would take time and that we would not have enough American troops to hold the streets for five to seven years. This plan was designed to minimize our casualties, unfortunately it maximized Iraqi casualties, a fact could not have been advertised to the world.

The Iraqi losses from terrorists and insurgents would have been much less but the U.S. losses would have been ten times. As the only targets, easy to find patrolling every street corner. Also as the only force keeping the peace, once they left all hell would break loose.

Slowly building the Iraqis up from scratch was the only viable solution. We had to disband Saddam’s army, he was still on the loose. Also, having to survive suicide bombs at police and army recruiting stations is a good test of loyalty to the new Iraq government.

It would have taken 300 to 500 thousand troops to secure the country and that level would have to be maintained for at least the first 3 years, not possible unless we sent all of our combat ready troops in at once and kept most of them there on 2 and 3 year rotations without a draft or pulling all troops from around the world Afghanistan, Korea, Germany and all other reserves.

Four years into it our armed forces are hard pressed to maintain 150,000 with rotations over a year long. Debathification may have been a mistake, but we don’t know, what would have resulted if we left the Saddam loyal people in power especially since it took a year after the end of major combat to find Saddam. Besides the army doesn’t keep the peace on the streets, the police do, Saddam did it with brutal secret police, they did not stick around after we took Baghdad. The US army was too small to patrol the streets we needed to circle the wagons in the green zone and bases until we could stand up some Iraqi troops and police to control the streets, that took a long time and certainly could have been done better.

Now that we are close to the point that we can start to put the Iraqis on the front lines, some democrats want us to go back to the secure bases and launch attacks on terrorists but let the Iraqis fall into full on civil war, a position they strongly criticized when we were doing it.