Retired military officers add new fire to Democrats’ criticism of war in Iraq

09/27/2006

Margaret Talev, McClatchy News Service
Last update: September 25, 2006 – 11:19 PM

WASHINGTON - Recently retired military officers who served in Iraq blamed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Monday for the morass there, said he should resign and urged senators to subpoena active generals to testify about their own similar concerns.

In testimony from former senior military men during wartime, retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton said Rumsfeld “continues to fight this war on the cheap” and denounced him as “incompetent.”

Retired Army Major Gen. John Batiste called the United States “arguably less safe now than it was on Sept. 11, 2001.”

And retired Marine Col. Thomas Hammes compared the shifting of insufficient U.S. troops from one Iraq hot spot to the next to a game of “Whac-A-Mole.”

The three, shunned by the Senate Armed Services Committee, spoke before the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, a rump group with little legislative clout.

Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., denounced the two-hour hearing, packed with antiwar activists and reporters, as “simply another partisan media event. And while it may rile up their liberal base, it won’t kill a single terrorist or prevent a single attack.”

Democrats repeatedly cited Sunday’s New York Times disclosure that a six-month-old National Intelligence Estimate concluded that the Iraq war has worsened the threat of global terrorism and inflamed anti-American sentiment throughout the Muslim world.

That was the consensus of 16 U.S. intelligence agencies. Democrats called for the report to be declassified.

Bush administration officials, however, are contesting the media accounts of the report, saying they describe only a portion of the conclusions and therefore distort the analysts’ findings on trends in global terrorism.

For the most part, the retired officers’ testimony played to the Democrats’ strategy of emphasizing disarray in Iraq and the Bush administration’s responsibility for it.

Batiste, for example, said Rumsfeld had surrounded himself with “like-minded and compliant subordinates,” underestimated the need for ground troops despite arguments to the contrary and was so insistent that there wouldn’t be an insurgency that “he threatened to fire the next person who talked about the need for a postwar plan.”

Eaton said planning for postwar Iraq had been “amateurish at best.”

But Hammes faulted Senate Democrats, too, saying they failed to raise important questions before the Iraq invasion because they feared being tarred as weak in 2002 elections.

Also Monday on Capitol Hill, the House approved a bill that would impose sanctions on the government of Sudan for atrocities and war crimes in that nation’s Darfur region. The Senate passed a nearly identical measure last week.