RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events "It's not about oil or Iraq..."

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Originally posted by Sonia:
You miss quote me, then again it's hard to hear me with my face in the Alpo bag.

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Sure JQ...sureeeeeee.


Our national security and a lasting peace in the middle east were the reasons we went to war......not this filth propaganda.......

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Originally posted by JQ:
Anyone want to respond to the topic anymore?

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Here's a couple questions for anyone who cares to respond:

1. What was the war in Iraq all about? National security? WMD & Chemical weapons? Oil? The economy? Just for fun? To stimulate the economy? Liberate the people of Iraq? What?

2. Do you trust President Bush?

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Originally posted by JQ:

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Sure JQ...sureeeeeee.


Our national security and a lasting peace in the middle east were the reasons we went to war......not this filth propaganda.......

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Sure PJP, sureeeeeee

Here's a couple questions for anyone who cares to respond:

1. What was the war in Iraq all about? National security? WMD & Chemical weapons? Oil? The economy? Just for fun? To stimulate the economy? Liberate the people of Iraq? What?

2. Do you trust President Bush?

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Shame on President Bush for wanting to maintain the world's strongest military! He should just be nice and let other countries pass us by. That would be the fair thing to do.

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National Security and Stability in the Region.......I don't need any other reasons than those.

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Originally posted by JQ:

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Shame on President Bush for wanting to maintain the world's strongest military! He should just be nice and let other countries pass us by. That would be the fair thing to do.

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I agree with you. President Bush should try and maintain the US's military and economic power. But it's the actions that can be taken with this as an excuse that scare me. Does anyone really want World War 3? This strategy sounds like something out of imperial Japan.

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National Security and Stability in the Region.......I don't need any other reasons than those.

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Those are very, very good reasons-if they're true. Do you really believe Iraq was an "imminent" threat to our National Security?

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How so? I like that you're reasoning this out, I just don't see where you're going on that particular point. Help me out here.

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Originally posted by Captain Sammitch:
You couldn't have Orwell without a functional socialism. I may not be a political expert but I know that much based on literary comprehension. I seriously doubt this country will have a functional socialism for some time. Although sometimes I wonder...

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Last September, German Justice Minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin pointed out that George Bush is using Iraq to distract the American public from his failed domestic policies. She capped her statement by reminding her audience: "That's a popular method. Even Hitler did that." She was chastised so severely that she soon recanted. But let's face it, she was right on the money. Rather than recanting, she should have clarified. She wasn't comparing Bush to the Hitler of the late 1930s and early 1940s; she was comparing him to the Hitler of the late 1920s and early 1930s. And if the jackboot fits . . .



What most Americans have forgotten about Hitler (or never knew in the first place) is that he came to power legally. He and his Nazi Party were elected democratically in a time of great national turmoil and crisis. They themselves had done much to cause the turmoil, of course, but that's what makes the Bush comparison so compelling.



Like the Bush administration, the Nazis were funded and ultimately ushered into power by wealthy industrialists looking for government favors in the form of tax breaks, big subsidies, and laws to weaken the rights of workers. When the Reichstag (Germany's Parliament building) was set ablaze in 1933(probably by Nazis), the Nazis framed their political rivals for it. In the general panic that followed, the German Parliament was purged of all left-wing representatives who might be soft on communists and foreigners, and the few who remained then VOTED to grant Chancellor Hitler dictatorial powers. The long, hideous nightmare had begun.
http://www.grant-greens.org/Patriot%20Act%20II.htm

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"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
-- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

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You couldn't have Orwell without a functional socialism. I may not be a political expert but I know that much based on literary comprehension. I seriously doubt this country will have a functional socialism for some time. Although sometimes I wonder...

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Of course the usual suspects will probably denounce me as a Bush basher. I however can sleep soundly knowing I'm questioning Bush's authority as I rightfully should as an American. If I'm wrong well no harm no foul, if I'm right then i'll be content in the fact that I spoke up when so many didn't.

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"War has provided both ancient and modern societies with a dependable system for stabilizing and controlling national economies. No alternate method of control has yet been tested in a complex modern economy that has shown itself remotely comparable in scope or effectiveness."

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The report also pointed out that the authority of the government over the people stemmed from its ability to wage war. Therefore, without war the government might cease to exist:

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"'war' is virtually synonymous with nationhood. The elimination of war implies the inevitable elimination of national sovereignty and the traditional nation-state."

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The report caused panic among many government officials. President Johnson supposedly "hit the roof" when he learned of it. Cables were sent to U.S. embassies throughout the world instructing them to play down public discussion of the report, and to emphasize that the report had nothing at all to do with official U.S. policy.

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Apparently, the genesis of the report occurred in 1966 when Victor Navasky, editor of the Monocle, a magazine of political satire, noticed a New York Times article reporting that the stock market had dipped because of a 'peace scare.' Navasky mentioned this to Lewin who then wrote the report. The two of them presented the report to E.L. Doctorow, editor of the Dial Press. Doctorow agreed to publish the work as nonfiction.

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Originally posted by JQ:
Everyone should read this: http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/iron.html

The reason I post a link to a report that was proven to be a hoax is because of the theme. Does our government use war to control the people and stimulate the economy? Here's a few quotes:

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"War has provided both ancient and modern societies with a dependable system for stabilizing and controlling national economies. No alternate method of control has yet been tested in a complex modern economy that has shown itself remotely comparable in scope or effectiveness."

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The report also pointed out that the authority of the government over the people stemmed from its ability to wage war. Therefore, without war the government might cease to exist:

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"'war' is virtually synonymous with nationhood. The elimination of war implies the inevitable elimination of national sovereignty and the traditional nation-state."

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The report caused panic among many government officials. President Johnson supposedly "hit the roof" when he learned of it. Cables were sent to U.S. embassies throughout the world instructing them to play down public discussion of the report, and to emphasize that the report had nothing at all to do with official U.S. policy.

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Apparently, the genesis of the report occurred in 1966 when Victor Navasky, editor of the Monocle, a magazine of political satire, noticed a New York Times article reporting that the stock market had dipped because of a 'peace scare.' Navasky mentioned this to Lewin who then wrote the report. The two of them presented the report to E.L. Doctorow, editor of the Dial Press. Doctorow agreed to publish the work as nonfiction.

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Originally posted by JQ:

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How so? I like that you're reasoning this out, I just don't see where you're going on that particular point. Help me out here.

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The U.S. could use this strategy as an excuse to attack some country for other reasons (stimulate the economy, Oil, etc). Read 1984, everyday the U.S. becomes more like the distopia portrayed by Orwell. This strategy sounds like an excuse to justify some sort of imperial intent.

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Yes, that's the suspicion. Especially when you read about The Project for the New American Century:

An obscure, ominous-sounding right-wing policy group called Project for the New American Century, or PNAC - affiliated with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld's top deputy Paul Wolfowitz and Bush's brother Jeb - even urged then-President Clinton to invade Iraq back in January 1998.

"We urge you to... enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world," stated the letter to Clinton, signed by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and others. "That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power." (For full text of the letter, see www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm)

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Drain the swamp and there will be no more mosquitoes

By attacking Iraq, the US will invite a new wave of terrorist attacks

Noam Chomsky
Monday September 9, 2002
The Guardian

September 11 shocked many Americans into an awareness that they had better pay much closer attention to what the US government does in the world and how it is perceived. Many issues have been opened for discussion that were not on the agenda before. That's all to the good.
It is also the merest sanity, if we hope to reduce the likelihood of future atrocities. It may be comforting to pretend that our enemies "hate our freedoms," as President Bush stated, but it is hardly wise to ignore the real world, which conveys different lessons.

The president is not the first to ask: "Why do they hate us?" In a staff discussion 44 years ago, President Eisenhower described "the campaign of hatred against us [in the Arab world], not by the governments but by the people". His National Security Council outlined the basic reasons: the US supports corrupt and oppressive governments and is "opposing political or economic progress" because of its interest in controlling the oil resources of the region.

Post-September 11 surveys in the Arab world reveal that the same reasons hold today, compounded with resentment over specific policies. Strikingly, that is even true of privileged, western-oriented sectors in the region.

To cite just one recent example: in the August 1 issue of Far Eastern Economic Review, the internationally recognised regional specialist Ahmed Rashid writes that in Pakistan "there is growing anger that US support is allowing [Musharraf's] military regime to delay the promise of democracy".

Today we do ourselves few favours by choosing to believe that "they hate us" and "hate our freedoms". On the contrary, these are attitudes of people who like Americans and admire much about the US, including its freedoms. What they hate is official policies that deny them the freedoms to which they too aspire.

For such reasons, the post-September 11 rantings of Osama bin Laden - for example, about US support for corrupt and brutal regimes, or about the US "invasion" of Saudi Arabia - have a certain resonance, even among those who despise and fear him. From resentment, anger and frustration, terrorist bands hope to draw support and recruits.

We should also be aware that much of the world regards Washington as a terrorist regime. In recent years, the US has taken or backed actions in Colombia, Nicaragua, Panama, Sudan and Turkey, to name a few, that meet official US definitions of "terrorism" - that is, when Americans apply the term to enemies.

In the most sober establishment journal, Foreign Affairs, Samuel Huntington wrote in 1999: "While the US regularly denounces various countries as 'rogue states,' in the eyes of many countries it is becoming the rogue superpower ... the single greatest external threat to their societies."

Such perceptions are not changed by the fact that, on September 11, for the first time, a western country was subjected on home soil to a horrendous terrorist attack of a kind all too familiar to victims of western power. The attack goes far beyond what's sometimes called the "retail terror" of the IRA, FLN or Red Brigades.

The September 11 terrorism elicited harsh condemnation throughout the world and an outpouring of sympathy for the innocent victims. But with qualifications.

An international Gallup poll in late September found little support for "a military attack" by the US in Afghanistan. In Latin America, the region with the most experience of US intervention, support ranged from 2% in Mexico to 16% in Panama.

The current "campaign of hatred" in the Arab world is, of course, also fuelled by US policies toward Israel-Palestine and Iraq. The US has provided the crucial support for Israel's harsh military occupation, now in its 35th year.

One way for the US to lessen Israeli-Palestinian tensions would be to stop refusing to join the long-standing international consensus that calls for recognition of the right of all states in the region to live in peace and security, including a Palestinian state in the currently occupied territories (perhaps with minor and mutual border adjustments).

In Iraq, a decade of harsh sanctions under US pressure has strengthened Saddam Hussein while leading to the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis - perhaps more people "than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history", military analysts John and Karl Mueller wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1999.

Washington's present justifications to attack Iraq have far less credibility than when President Bush Sr was welcoming Saddam as an ally and a trading partner after he had committed his worst brutalities - as in Halabja, where Iraq attacked Kurds with poison gas in 1988. At the time, the murderer Saddam was more dangerous than he is today.

As for a US attack against Iraq, no one, including Donald Rumsfeld, can realistically guess the possible costs and consequences. Radical Islamist extremists surely hope that an attack on Iraq will kill many people and destroy much of the country, providing recruits for terrorist actions.

They presumably also welcome the "Bush doctrine" that proclaims the right of attack against potential threats, which are virtually limitless. The president has announced: "There's no telling how many wars it will take to secure freedom in the homeland." That's true.

Threats are everywhere, even at home. The prescription for endless war poses a far greater danger to Americans than perceived enemies do, for reasons the terrorist organisations understand very well.

Twenty years ago, the former head of Israeli military intelligence, Yehoshaphat Harkabi, also a leading Arabist, made a point that still holds true. "To offer an honourable solution to the Palestinians respecting their right to self-determination: that is the solution of the problem of terrorism," he said. "When the swamp disappears, there will be no more mosquitoes."

At the time, Israel enjoyed the virtual immunity from retaliation within the occupied territories that lasted until very recently. But Harkabi's warning was apt, and the lesson applies more generally.

Well before September 11 it was understood that with modern technology, the rich and powerful will lose their near monopoly of the means of violence and can expect to suffer atrocities on home soil.

If we insist on creating more swamps, there will be more mosquitoes, with awesome capacity for destruction.

If we devote our resources to draining the swamps, addressing the roots of the "campaigns of hatred", we can not only reduce the threats we face but also live up to ideals that we profess and that are not beyond reach if we choose to take them seriously.

© Noam Chomsky

New York Times Syndicate

Noam Chomsky is professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the US bestseller 9-11

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August 24, 2003


THE WORLD
Dissolving Iraqi Army Seen by Many as a Costly Move
U.S. officials say they had no choice but to disband the military. The coalition now faces attack and must rebuild the force.

By Mark Fineman, Warren Vieth and Robin Wright, Times Staff Writers


WASHINGTON — U.S. civil administrator L. Paul Bremer III had been on the job in Baghdad less than two weeks when he announced a decision that sent shockwaves through Iraqi society.

With a stroke of the pen, Bremer dissolved Iraq's vast armed services, sending pink slips to more than 400,000 armed officers and enlisted men whose light resistance had helped secure the U.S.-led military victory against their government.

It was a decision that went against the advice of U.S. experts and exiled Iraqi military officers. They had spent months preparing detailed plans for the Bush administration that called for giving the Iraqi army a key role in winning the peace.

Now, many Iraqis believe, the cost of that decision is becoming painfully clear. U.S. troops and occupation officials are struggling to go it alone in defending themselves and Iraq against daily attacks by armed opponents, who are blowing up water mains, oil pipelines, electric towers, military convoys and, this month, the Jordanian Embassy and the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad.

Some experts believe that Bremer's May 23 edict may even have provided recruits for the insurgency by alienating trained officers and enlisted men who were enraged by the decree. One administration official suggested last week that former senior officers may even be "directing" the attacks.

At the same time, Pentagon leaders are calling for Iraqis to take a greater role in defending their country against attacks. They are to build a new Iraqi army from scratch — while most of the old army sits at home collecting stipends of $50 to $150 a month.

"Instead of us using these personnel against terrorism, terrorists are using them against us," said former Iraqi special forces Maj. Mohammed Faour, who helped lead a group of exiles who were consulted in the administration's early postwar military planning.

'A Tragedy'

"This is a tragedy. We could use these people. They are military people. They are professionals. They are used to obeying orders. They need money. They need the lives they had before," he said.

In defending the decision, Bremer, his top aides and administration officials in Washington said the army had dissolved itself and there was no Iraqi military left to rebuild. They added that the decision — made at "very high policy levels" in Washington — also was meant as a "highly symbolic" message that the old Iraqi government was dead.

"By the time the conflict was over, that army, so-called, didn't exist anymore. There was nothing to disband," Bremer said in a recent interview. The ranks of top officers, he added, "had been in the army so long they were essentially not going to be re-treadable into the new army."

Some Iraqis find that explanation disingenuous. Tens of thousands of soldiers who went home rather than fight did so because the American forces urged them to, with weeks of leafleting that admonished them not to fight.

In the weeks before Bremer issued his decree, Iraqi officers were telling anyone who would listen — from visiting exiles to foreign journalists to U.S. military officials — that they were simply waiting for the Americans to order them back to their barracks.

Bremer's decree appeared to reverse course from the path chosen by his predecessor, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, whose original post-battle plan incorporated much of the nation-rebuilding role the exiles envisioned for Iraq's defeated armed forces.

Some also believe that the decision has contributed to escalating violence in Iraq. Those suspicions were fueled by evidence that the bomb used in last week's U.N. blast was cobbled together from Soviet military munitions, a mainstay of Saddam Hussein's army.

Indeed, shortly after the bombing, senior coalition official and former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik was quoted as saying that authorities would not rule out former Iraqi military involvement in the blast, which left at least 20 dead.

"It was an atrocious decision" to disband the army, said Feisal Istrabadi, a Chicago attorney who participated in a State Department project dubbed Future of Iraq.

"I don't understand why you take 400,000 men who were lightly armed and trained, and turn them into your enemies," he said. "Particularly when these are people who didn't fight."

Some postwar planners flatly rejected Bremer's claim that the armed forces could not be restored. Soon after Bremer's order, his aides had lists of their names to give them severance pay.

"It would have been so easy to declare that the Iraqi army, what's left of the regular army, should reassemble in its barracks in order to get their monthly salaries," Faour said, adding that eight to 10 former Iraqi officers in Baghdad told him in early May that they were ready and willing to work for the Americans.

"You can't put half a million people with families and weapons and a monthly salary on the dole. You can't do this in any country. They'll turn against you."

Administration officials in Washington insist that even if the Iraqi army hadn't dissolved itself, it would have taken months for occupying forces to determine which officers and enlisted men could be trusted. An estimated 9,000 officers, for example, were members of Hussein's Baath Party, whose top ranks Bremer barred from government jobs.

"The army was the main instrument of repression by Saddam Hussein," one of those administration officials said. "If we had allowed the army to continue in its present form, we would be losing hearts and minds right now."

The ban on Baathists and the dismantling of Iraq's armed forces were top agenda items for influential conservative advisors in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's office.

"There was also a sense of, 'We'll make sure they never have a chance to do this again,' " recalled one U.S. official in Baghdad. "People very quickly realized this was wrong. Even the U.S. military reminded us that we won because the [Iraqi] military didn't fight."

Gutting what was once the most powerful Arab army on their doorstep was also a priority for Israel's generals, critics say. The generals routinely visited Rumsfeld's Special Plans Office as it developed plans for postwar Iraq.

The move was also endorsed by Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, a Pentagon favorite to lead an interim Iraqi government.

Administration officials close to the planning insisted that no such agenda was behind the decision.

"This is not a neoconservative agenda," one administration official said, asking not to be identified.

"These are decisions that were made at very high levels of the government and backed by Bremer. In the end, they will bear fruit If we didn't dissolve the German army or the SS after World War II, where would we be today?"

Whatever the origins of the decision, it came despite volumes of contrary advice. Those recommendations, included in official postwar planning reports obtained by The Times, anticipated much of what has happened in Iraq since.

For example, the 18 members of the Defense Policy and Institutions working group of the Future of Iraq project foresaw the problems that could occur if Hussein's military was abruptly disbanded.

In documents circulated through the Pentagon and State Department, the working group urged U.S. officials to incorporate career soldiers and officers in Iraq's new armed services.

"More than 80% of the military were not die-hard Saddam-ites," said one diplomatic source who was in Baghdad at the time.

Recommendations

Among the recommendations offered by members of the Future of Iraq defense working group, according to their documents:

• Iraq's approximately 100,000 career soldiers should form the nucleus of a new, defensive military force removed from political activities. (In addition to the careerists, Iraq had more than 300,000 involuntary conscripts.)

• The framework of the Republican Guard should be retained, and most of its personnel transferred to a new Iraqi army, after screening to remove Hussein loyalists.

• Special forces brigades should be reorganized as peacekeeping forces and participate in the war against terrorism and drug smuggling.

• Military intelligence units should assist American forces with security and reconnaissance of terrorist organizations and hostile regimes.

• Former military personnel should be redeployed to assist in disaster situations such as floods and earthquakes and to participate in major agricultural and construction projects.

• A special police force consisting of Iraqi military and coalition personnel should be formed to maintain security and protect Iraqi institutions and infrastructure, such as the oil pipelines now targeted by insurgents.

The goal was to incorporate the military into civilian society and to use it as a vehicle for Iraq's reconstruction.

The recommendations dovetailed with other reports that independently reached similar conclusions.

Ahmed Hashim, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island and an expert on the Iraqi military, had drafted a detailed analysis on the need to purge, yet protect, the Iraqi military as an institution.

He had briefed postwar planners at Washington's National Defense University, which is run by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"I argued the army needed to be made smaller and based on the best of the regular army divisions And then I said the demobilized men immediately need to be given some kind of work, to ensure they don't become partisans or members of organized crime," Hashim said in a recent interview.

At his first news conference in March, Garner declared his intention to use the regular army to "help rebuild their own country" and "not to demobilize it immediately and put a lot of unemployed people on the street."

"We'd continue to pay them," Garner told reporters, "to do things like engineering, road construction, work on bridges, remove rubble, de-mine, pick up unexploded ordnance, construction work."

But those plans evaporated along with the army, asserted Walter Slocombe, Bremer's senior advisor on military affairs in Baghdad.

"The Iraqi army disbanded itself, or with a certain amount of encouragement from coalition forces. And by what, April 15 or whatever, there was simply no organized unit," Slocombe recalled in a recent interview in Baghdad.

Of the various recommendations for using the army, he said, "they were thrown aside in the sense that it was evident there was no subject there to work with."

But that nonexistent army suddenly materialized by the tens of thousands in the streets of Baghdad almost before the ink was dry on the decree to disband it.

"Dissolving the Iraqi army is a humiliation to the dignity of the nation," declared one of the many banners borne by the thousands of former Iraqi soldiers and officers who began gathering almost daily outside the gates of the occupation headquarters.

Bombarded by such dissent, Garner's successor, Bremer, adjusted his course, promising to pay the disbanded military additional stipends and invite some members to join the New Iraqi Corps — but no one above the rank of lieutenant colonel.

"We had concluded talking to Iraqis, both in and out of the military, that people above the level of lieutenant colonel, because they had been in the army for so long, were essentially not going to be re-treadable into the new army," Bremer said. "We had to create an entirely new institution."

Training the Recruits

The first 500 recruits started training in Kirkuk this month, helping to build a force that will total just 12,000 by the end of the year and 40,000 by the end of 2004. Bremer's aides also are building a new civil defense force, training a core group of 2,300 that will "put an Iraqi face" on the hunt for Baathists, officials said.

Meanwhile, officers sweating in endless lines to collect their stipends have been warning of revenge for months.

"My colleagues and I sweated in the heat, and we did not get a thing," said Salah Lami, who gave up after nine hours in line this month.

"Iraqis by nature are very patient, but patience has its limits. When they run out of patience, it is going to be very hard on us and very hard on the Americans."

For Faour, the former intelligence officer, it's not too late to undo the damage.

"We still have time. The people are still there. They can still start, from now, working on establishing security forces from these people

"This would be very positive for them now, to start gathering the people instead of losing them."

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Times staff writers Alissa J. Rubin and John Daniszewski in Baghdad contributed to this report.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-iraqarmy24aug24002421,1,293282.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage

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August 25, 2003


THE WORLD
U.S. Military Strength Called Lacking in Iraq
Republican senators are among those saying more troops are needed to speed rebuilding efforts. The White House rejects the idea.

By Ronald Brownstein and Richard Simon, Times Staff Writers


WASHINGTON — President Bush faced intensified pressure Sunday to commit more troops to Iraq, even as administration officials argued that the existing deployment is sufficient and a new poll showed that nearly half of Americans want to withdraw the forces already in the field.

Appearing on Sunday television shows, several prominent senators from both parties called on Bush to bolster forces in Iraq and accelerate efforts to restore basic services to the war-ravaged nation.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), returning from a trip to Iraq, called on Bush to send "at least another division" — which could mean an additional 17,000 troops.

"We are in a very serious situation a race against time," McCain, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on NBC's "Meet the Press." "We need to spend a whole lot more money to get services back to the people. We need to get the electricity going, the fuel, the water. And unless we get that done and get it done pretty soon, we could face a very [serious] situation."

Administration officials rejected the call for bolstered forces. Asked on CNN's "Late Edition" if more troops were needed, L. Paul Bremer III, the top civilian administrator for Iraq, replied, "I don't think so."

The remarks came as a bomb exploded at the home of one of Iraq's preeminent Shiite Muslim clerics in the southern city of Najaf, killing three guards and wounding 10 other people. The cleric, the Ayatollah Mohammed Saeed Hakim, escaped serious injury.

In Washington, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said stabilizing Iraq would require at least 40,000 more troops — and financial commitments totaling "several hundred billion dollars" over the next several years.

Biden argued that the only realistic way to meet such military and financial obligations was through a new U.N. resolution that would encourage other countries to participate.

"We have to have a U.N. resolution," Biden said on "Meet the Press." "So I don't know why we don't get on with it [Either] we do it all by ourselves or we get the rest of the international community to help us do it. It's that simple."

Without offering a specific figure, Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, also said that the U.S.-led occupation authority needs more forces.

Asked on "Late Edition" if the U.S. had enough troops in Iraq, Lugar said: "Perhaps not, and probably not the right ones We are not configured as a nation in our armed forces or the State Department to deal with nation-building. "

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Troubled Occupation

The continued violence in Iraq has become an increasingly ominous political problem for Bush in the nearly four months since he declared an end to major combat May 1.

Since Bush appeared before a banner reading "mission accomplished" that day, 137 U.S. troops have died in Iraq from hostile fire and other causes, and the Democratic presidential candidates are aggressively accusing the administration of failing to adequately plan for the Iraq reconstruction. Lately, some leading Republicans, including McCain, Lugar and Sen. Charles Hagel (R-Neb.), a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, have also said that the U.S. needs to rethink its effort in Iraq.

"It will take a concerted new plan" to calm the situation, Lugar said Sunday.

Last week, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell began discussions at the United Nations aimed at passing a resolution that would broaden international participation in the occupation. But his call received a cool response amid complaints from other nations that the Bush administration was asking them to assume responsibility without offering to meaningfully share authority.

At a Washington news conference Thursday, Army Gen. John Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, said the coalition has enough forces in Iraq to secure the country. The U.S. has 146,000 troops in Iraq, while 27 other nations have contributed 21,700 — more than half from Britain.

On Sunday, other U.S. officials echoed that conclusion. Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he rejected arguments that the coalition cannot secure Iraq without significantly more troops, although he acknowledged that he would defer to Abizaid's judgment.

"If Gen. Abizaid says he wants more troops, then sure, we'll be open to that, you bet," Myers said on "Meet the Press."

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Clock Is Ticking

But McCain, Biden and retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, the former supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization who is contemplating a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, all argued Sunday that Iraq could grow even more chaotic and dangerous if the occupation authority cannot quickly improve daily life there.

"Time is not on our side," McCain said. "People in 125- degree heat with no electricity and no fuel are going to become angry in a big hurry What we do over the next several months will determine whether we're in a very difficult situation or not."

Clark, who said he will announce a decision on whether he will join the crowded Democratic presidential field "sometime in the next week or two," argued that the best way to improve security in Iraq is to increase international participation in the rebuilding.

"This is much more than a military problem," Clark said on the CBS program "Face the Nation." "The military security is a fundamental. [But] you have to have a political development strategy above it. For that, we really need the legitimacy of the United Nations. We need a U.N. mission in there."

Howard Dean, another Democratic presidential contender, made similar arguments on "Late Edition." Dean said the administration must "give up some authority over the occupation" to entice other nations to increase their military and financial support for the effort.

"We desperately need this not to be an American occupation," said Dean, a former Vermont governor. "We need this to be something more like a U.N. mandate, a temporary occupation by world forces in order to bring Iraq into a democratized situation."

A new poll released this weekend by Newsweek showed enormous public support for increasing the U.N. role in Iraq — and a continuing rise in anxiety over the direction of the reconstruction.

In the poll, 52% of respondents said the occupation was going well, while 44% said it was going badly; in late July, the figures were 57% and 40%. Nearly three in four said the U.S. should cede more authority to the U.N. if that was necessary to encourage other nations to send more troops to Iraq.

An emphatic majority — 55% to 40% — said they opposed sending more American troops to the country; perhaps most worrisome for the White House, 48% of those polled said the U.S. should withdraw its troops from Iraq, while 47% rejected that option.


Times staff writer Tracy Wilkinson in Baghdad contributed to this report.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fg-iraq25aug25235420,1,3072185.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage

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