Wolfowitz, Will You Ever, Ever Come Clean? Re: General Franks new book

PAUL WOLFOWITZ, WILL YOU EVER, EVER COME CLEAN?:

Q: In addition to the reservations that have been expressed about the decision to go into Iraq, we certainly have gotten a lot of reporting from within the military raising questions about not so much the conduct of the war itself, so much as the conduct of the occupation following the war, as well as reports from military within Afghanistan complaining that neither in Iraq nor in Afghanistan have sufficient resources been made available for the troops to their job. Complaints from Afghanistan about shortage of planes, shortage of equipment, inability to really pursue the war on terror because so many resources have gone to Iraq, complaints from general saying that they actually needed twice as many troops on the ground to maintain the peace, following the war that DoD thought was necessary. Can you comment on that kind of thinking and that kind of report which we consistently get from so many men in the military?

SEC. WOLFOWITZ: Well, I'm not sure where you get it because that's--you've said a lot. Let me start with something Bill Bradley said last night which simply falls. (sic) He said General Shinseki was fired. General Shinseki was not fired. General Shinseki served his full four years as chief of staff for the army. I think he also said that President Bush ignored the advice of his senior military advisor that we needed 300,000 troops in Iraq. I presume you're referring to General Shinseki. President Bush's senior military advisors for the war, were not the chief of staff of the army. They were the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, and General Franks, the combatant commander in Iraq. And General Frank's requirement was exactly what he got and his estimate of what we needed postwar was about a quarter of what General Shinseki talked about in public.

--Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, responding to a question at an Aspen Institute forum, July 16, 2004

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I would say that what's been mobilized to this point, something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers.

--Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki, responding to Senator Carl Levin's question about troop necessities in Iraq after the downfall of Saddam Hussein, Senate Armed Services Committee, February 25, 2003

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Then I turned to reveal the next chart: PHASE IV: POST-HOSTILITY OPERATIONS. "As stability operations proceed, force levels would continue to grow--perhaps to as many as two hundred and fifty thousand troops, or until we are sure we've met our endstate objectives." (Emphasis added.)

--General Tommy Franks, in a briefing to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on his updated plan for an invasion of Iraq, February 1, 2002, according to Franks's memoir, American Soldier, p. 366

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http://tnr.com/blog/iraqd
Spencer Ackerman