Back From Iraq, Still Facing Fire
By OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
WRITING For NEW YORK TIMES
Today and tomorrow, the United States ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, and the top American general there, David Petraeus, will appear before Congress to offer a progress report on the war. The Op-Ed page asked six experts on the Iraq conflict to come up with three questions they would pose to the two men.
Starving the Troops
1. General Petraeus, why have the White House and State Department failed you by neglecting a diplomatic and economic surge to complement the military one?
2. Based on the counterinsurgency calculus in the new Army manual you helped write, you don’t have sufficient manpower in Iraq, even with the surge. Why has the administration not given you enough troops?
3. Americans are well aware of the shortages of matériel, from rifle scopes to armored Humvees, our troops have suffered from. Why, for example, have you not been given a sufficient number of the effective mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles called “MRAPs”?
— Paul D. Eaton, a retired Army major general who was in charge of training the Iraqi military from 2003 to 2004.
