New military leaders question Iraq mission

[maddezmom]

New military leaders question Iraq mission
By Nancy A. Youssef and Renee Schoof | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Thursday, October 4, 2007 email | print tool nameclose
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Chad J. McNeeley / MCT

Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff | View larger image
WASHINGTON — Four and a half years after the nation's top military leaders saluted and fell in behind President Bush's pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, their replacements are beginning to question the mission and sound alarms about the toll the war is taking on the Army and the Marine Corps.

The change at the Pentagon is striking but little-noticed, in part because Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a longtime veteran of the CIA, is quiet where his predecessor Donald H. Rumsfeld was not.

"It's part of a sea change," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a national-security research center in Washington. "The ideologues have been replaced by managers who view Iraq not as a cause, but a problem to be solved."

Gates, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Michael Mullen, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, Undersecretary for Intelligence Gen. James Clapper and other top officials also are concerned that the war may be crippling the military's ability to respond to other crises. They have allies in the congressional Democratic leadership — particularly House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri — who've been speaking out about that for months.

"I'm convinced we are in serious trouble readiness-wise," Skelton said this week in an interview with McClatchy Newspapers. "Am I worried? I'm worried to death."

Although Democrats in Congress have been powerless to halt or even slow the war, six developments have combined to produce growing resistance, even within some parts of Bush's own administration, to the president's unrelenting emphasis on staying the course in Iraq:

more:http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/20227.html


read Mullen's letter to the troops here:

http://www.defenselink.mil/pdf/letter-to-troops.pdf

[BOSSHOG]

1. Our troops (the real ones and the fake ones)

are in much better hands with Admiral Mullen then General Pace who was way too much the bush yes man. I actually believe Mullen and Gates do support the troops. We all know the gop and the right wing noise machine and the PNAC knuckleheads could not possibly care one iota about our kids who continue to die for a lie.