They need more gunfodder in Iraq to protect the January 30 elections:
The United States will boost its forces in Iraq to a record number of 150,000 in coming weeks because inexperienced Iraqi troops cannot ensure security for next month's national elections, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq said Saturday.
Gen. John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command, said "it had been our hope" that troop increases before the Jan. 30 election would consist mostly of Iraqis.
But "while the Iraqi troops are larger in number than they used to be, those forces have to be seasoned more, trained more. So, it's necessary to bring more American forces," he said.
The United States currently has about 138,000 troops in Iraq. On Wednesday, the Pentagon said the deployment would increase to about 150,000 by mid-January -- slightly more than during the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein's regime.
Most of that increase will come through extending until March the tours of duty of more than 10,000 soldiers and Marines originally scheduled to return home in January.
Only a few points: We wouldn't need so many new GIs if we hadn't lost so many to death and disfigurement. We wouldn't need so many new GIs if we didn't insist on the totally ridiculous plan of having elections in a country which is at war; who in their right minds will believe that these elections are going to be fair and transparent? Better just hand over the country to the radical clerics right away. And finally, we wouldn't need so many new GIs if Bush hadn't lied about the need to go to war and if he hadn't attacked the wrong country to begin with.
If we need a lot of new forces, why not look into the Heritage Foundation and other think tanks of the same ilk for more troops? They are the ones who wanted to do this war in the first place.