Talk:Retirement of General Shinseki

message: :The president ... went to Cincinnati, and he gave a speech in which he said, "We will plan carefully. We will proceed cautiously. We will not make war inevitable. We will go with our allies." He didn't do any of those things. They didn't do the planning. They left the planning of the State Department in the State Department desks. They avoided even the advice of their own general, General Shinseki. The Army chief of staff, said. "You're going to need several hundred thousand troops." Instead of listening to him, they retired him. (emphasis added for Wikipedia talk page) 
Is this equivalent to saying Bush "retired him for saying we needed more troops"? I don't think so, not after studying this matter so intently. Okay, maybe he insinuated that idea...
But the context was a bit larger. Kerry was saying that Bush didn't listen to him (Kerry) or to Shinseki, and that Bush broke his promises:
* to plan carefully
* to proceed cautiously
* not to make war inevitable
* to go with our allies
I was in the army 5 years. From what I have been able to see of the war-planning process, it definitely was careful. They even brought MOPP gear -- masks and charcoal-laden suits to protect against chemical and biological weapons. (It turned out they didn't need them, but if (a) they hadn't brought them and (b) Saddam had used chem or bio, everyone including me would have said Bush didn't plan carefully.
The invasion plan was done so well that American and British casualties were very low. I'd call that proceeding cautiously. In fact, the shock and awe worked so well that (as Bush said later in the debate) they enemy just folded up and went home.
Bus did NOT make the war inevitable. Saddam could have avoided it, if he had simply begun cooperating with the arms inspectors. Ironically, if the Democrats are right about Saddam never having had and WMD, Saddam could have proven this easily via such cooperation. Instead, he chose not to cooperate. The war wasn't inevitable: letting the UN and all see that he had no WMD (if that was really true then) would have prevented it.
So, either:
* He had WMD, but needed more time to hide them; or,
* He had no WMD, but didn't want to admit he had been bluffing.
Either way, he was playing tricks that precipitated a war.
I'm not sure how mush allied troop strength Bush promised to send to Iraq, but the number of countries exceeded those who fought alongside us in the Korean War (15 then). I don't think Bush promised to bring France and Germany; Spain came, but left after a terrorist attack during their elections; Russia never was an ally.
Hmm. A friend tells me I'm making too much of this. --Uncle Ed 17:58, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Honestly?  I'd agree.  It's getting into whether Shinseki was right in his assessment of troop demands.  For purposes of this article, it doesn't really matter -- especially if the Bush admistration's assertion that his assessment of troop demands had nothing to do with his retirement is true.  I think the salient points are these:
* Shinseki's interpretation is that he was forced into retirement;
* Kerry's interpretation is that he was forced into retirement specifically for his assessment of troop requirements;
* Bush's interpretation is that he wasn't forced into retirement at all;
* The facts so far do not make any of these interpretations so compelling that the others are thereby falsified.
Even if we had the word of an oracle that Shinseki's projections were completely wrong and incompetently so, all that would do is substantiate an interpretation not on the table:  that Shinseki was forced into retirement over his troop projections and that forced retirement was justified.  That, however, would be a hard bar to meet the standards of proof for; it wouldn't be enough just to say "in retrospect, Shinseki was wrong because he said we'd need this many troops and we succeeded with this lesser amount" (and even that is presuming that everyone could agree that we've "succeeded").  You'd have to prove that the projections could be seen by any reasonable observer to be inaccurate beforehand -- and you couldn't even get a consensus from all reasonable observers now that those projections were inaccurate.  -- Antaeus Feldspar 18:19, 8 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Kerry debate quote