Iraq Push Revives Criticism of Force Size-Baghdad Offensive May Shift Violence Elsewhere

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/22/AR2007062202013.html?hpid=topnews

Iraq Push Revives Criticism of Force Size
Baghdad Offensive May Shift Violence Elsewhere

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 23, 2007; Page A01

The major U.S. offensive launched last weekend against insurgents in and around Baghdad has significantly expanded the military's battleground in Iraq -- "a surge of operations," and no longer just of troops, as the second-ranking U.S. commander there said yesterday -- but it has renewed concerns about whether even the bigger U.S. troop presence there is large enough.

As the U.S. offensive, code-named Phantom Thunder, has been greeted with a week of intensified fighting in areas outside the capital -- areas that the U.S. military has largely left untouched for as long as three years -- the push raised fears from security experts and officers in the field that the new attacks might simply propel the enemy from one area to another where there are not as many U.S. troops.

Since President Bush ordered the troop increase in January, the military had focused on creating a more secure environment in Baghdad. "We are beyond a surge of forces," Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno said yesterday in a briefing from his headquarters in the Iraqi capital. He did not directly address the size of the force, saying only that the addition of 30,000 U.S. troops over five months "allows us to operate in areas where we have not been for a long time."

Retired Army Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, who in 2003 was among the first to call public attention to the relatively small size of the U.S. invasion force, said that the new operation shows how outnumbered U.S. troops remain. "Why would we think that a temporary presence of 30,000 additional combat troops in a giant city would change the dynamics of a bitter civil war?" he said in an interview yesterday. "It's a fool's errand."

An officer working in Arrowhead Ripper, the subsidiary offensive in Diyala province, said wearily, "We just do not have the forces in country right now to have the appropriate level of presence across the country."

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Of course.
We need to escalate the fucking escalation.
Fuck me.
We are all fucked.
Come September our Brave Democrats will be sending even more money to Bush and even more troops to die. They would not want to be seen as Not Sportin Da Troops. That would be BAD.

come September; they've already got blood on their hands imo, and they KNOW we're not happy with their last vote. So said Pelosi this week anyway. We shall see.