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Sen. Inhofe: U.S. Troops Out of Iraq by June 2007
Oklahoma’s Republican Sen. James M. Inhofe, second-ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told a Heritage Foundation audience Monday that the Iraqis should be able to take over country security from the Coalition forces by June of 2007. "Nobody will answer the question [of when the United States can withdraw the bulk of its forces] ... well, I’ll answer it,” Inhofe pronounced in a presentation entitled "Grading National Security.” "We have 220,000 Iraqi troops now,” the lawmaker explained. "By the end of the year, we will have 300,000. All the experts agree that it will take 10 divisions of Iraqi troops to do the job – that’s 325,000. At the present rate, we will be at that level in June of 2007.” "The number of our troops will go down to just an administrative level” at that time, he added.
Inhofe, who has made 10 trips into the Iraq area of operations, pointed to what he saw as real progress in the country. "Violence did not spike just before the last elections,” he pointed out, noting that the number of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were down 30 percent; suicide bombings down 70 percent; with no incursions in two months along the once infamous and bloody airport road from Baghdad - where the average at one time was 10 incursions a week. "We used to get 550 tips a week from Iraqis; now it’s 5,000 a month,” Inhofe said. "The president has done a great job,” Inhofe said by way of a report card, noting that George W. Bush came into the game with a lot of heavy baggage to wear him down, including "a military that was in disarray.”
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For eight years of the Clinton administration, the Pentagon was funded at $313 billion below base line – or $413 billion below the static inflation line, Inhofe explained. "The military budget was reduced to lowest percent of GNP since before World War II.”
With various charts, the lawmaker illustrated that President Bush - in the six years he has been in office - increased the military budget $662 billion above the baseline (with supplemental appropriations included). Inhofe also noted how the Bush administration had raised military benefits and salaries - decreasing the civilian/military pay gap and closing the housing allowance gap. The senator said Bush has presided over a geometric growth in military facility with languages, psychological operations, special operations, and precision weapons to replace brute force. He argued that the military was now organized into useful and nimble combat teams; the shortage of Navy spare parts has been corrected; and air logistics centers, which keep warplanes flying, have been created and are operating efficiently. Inhofe further noted that Operation Iraqi Freedom – early in the game - took out three terrorist training camps; that Bush established a vital Counterterrorism Center; and that the FBI was transformed into an instrument for preventing terror.
Additionally, Inhofe maintained, under the present administration, there has been established a national targeting center for cargo; a bio-shield project; an effective attack on terror financing marked with frozen assets and seizures; and an erasure of many safe havens for terrorists. Inhofe reserved time to lambaste a recent Democrat report prepared by former Defense Secretary William Perry and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, which warned that unless the strain on the Army and Marine Corps is relieved soon, "it will have highly corrosive and potentially long-term effects on the force.” Over time, the report argued, the services would be weakened and the country would be more vulnerable to potential enemies. But Inhofe said that the incredible irony was that the authors of the dire warning report "are the very people who are responsible [for a weakened military] – if any of this is true.” Inhofe added that Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker had "disavowed” to him the report’s conclusions and that he would have more to say on the subject in a floor speech Tuesday.
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