I have often wondered about why Rumsfeld was so insistent on going to Iraq with far fewer soldiers than even his General staff recommended.He went to the extent of sacking Gen.Eric Shinseki who wanted double the number of soldiers we have there today.
The obvious answers from a Democratic standpoint would be he wanted to keep costs down so he could wage war for a longer period of time,was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to recruit enough bodies for a protracted guerilla war and would even meet with some resistance from the likes of Powell and other Republicans if he asked for a larger force right off the bat.
But, after seeing the impact Cindy Sheehan is having on these cowards, I think the real reason may lie elsewhere.They want to leave a smaller “footprint” on the American people as a whole.A larger force, of course, means larger casualties.It would be more difficult to hide the killed, wounded and maimed if they arrive home in larger numbers.That, in turn, would cause political difficulties at home for the Republicans.Imagine a hundred Cindy Sheehans, tented in front of all the warmongers offices and homes.That would be the nightmare Rumsfeld would be battling even now.
Unfortunately for people like Cindy and countless others, their nightmares have become real, precisely because Rumsfeld made the fatal decision to keep his exposure to the American public low.As a consummate bureaucrat and a great believer in disinformation, Rumsfeld knows that keeping facts from Americans about the war and its consequences was Job 1. A larger force
at the outset would have made that task that much more difficult.This also explains why Bush, Cheney and the entire administration hardly bothers to show up at the funerals of soldiers and would not permit any photographs of the killed or the wounded.
