United States President George W Bush suffered a serious rebuke from 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 midterm elections in which the war is 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 the Pentagon chief, Donald Rumsfeld.
Three retired senior military officers on Monday accused Rumsfeld 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, said: ”Rumsfeld and his immediate team must be replaced or we will see two more years of extraordinarily bad decision-making.”
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 last weekend, which said the Iraq war had fuelled 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 armour 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, Schoomaker. The seriousness of the protest was underlined by Schoomaker’s ÂÂreputation as an ally of the Pentagon chief. The general came 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 think-tank. ”Virtually everyone in the army feels as though their needs have been short-changed.”
Schoomaker’s defiance gives a voice to growing concern within the military about the costs of the US’s wars, and the long-term strain of carrying out operations around the world.
For the past three years, the $400-billion cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been funded by emergency spending Bills passed by Congress. But Schoomaker and ÂÂothers 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, high-tech military. In addition, Congress and the White House have cut a number of army spending requests over the past months. ”There is no sense in us submitting a budget that we can’t execute, a broken budget,” he told a Washington audience.
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’s senior ÂÂcommander in the ÂÂMiddle East, said last week there was little chance of any drawing down of the 140 000 forces in Iraq before early in the new year.
The burden of that commitment was underlined on Monday when the army extended the combat tours of about 4 000 soldiers serving in the Ramadi area.
l In Basra on Monday, British troops killed a prominent al-Qaeda ÂÂfigure who was hiding in Iraq after escaping from US custody in Afghanistan last year, the  British ministry of defence said.
Omar Faruq was shot dead while resisting arrest during a pre-dawn raid by 250 soldiers after a long-planned intelligence-led operation. A British military spokesman described Faruq as a ”very, very significant man”. — Â