Reply #23: Not Enough Troops [View All]

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

The United States currently has (by the best of my quickie research) 3.8 law enforcement personnel per 1,000 population (that includes federal, state, local, and civilian personnel). Based on Iraq's population of 26,000,000 it would require nearly 100,000 bodies to simply maintain policing efforts on the same scale as here in the U.S.

Please note that we don't have an armed insurgency in America (yet) and our police departments aren't trying to put out fires (literally and figuratively) as are our troops in Iraq. Combine that with the need to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure and provide security against insurgent attacks (a different effort from actually hunting down the insurgents), and you can see that there's simply no way that 135,000 U.S. troops could adequately maintain control in Iraq.

It would take twice that many troops to do the job, but the U.S. simply doesn't have the manpower to do the job -- and during the past year, the Bush Administration has done virtually nothing to draw more nations into the coalition. We're now trying to rely on the hastily-training and loyalty-challenged Iraqi Security Forces. And you can see how much good that has done.