Pelosi's Reversal On "Escalating" Troops In Iraq

By now you are probably aware that Speaker Pelosi's current position that we should not increase the number of American troops in Iraq is quite inconsistent with her criticism of President Bush in May 2004.

Appearing on NBC News' "Meet The Press," then House Minority Leader Pelosi called for increasing the number of troops in Iraq.

MR. RUSSERT: What would you do in Iraq today right now?

REP. PELOSI: What I would do and what I think our country must do in Iraq is take an assessment of where we are. And there has to be a leveling with the American people and with the Congress of the United States as to what is really actually happening there. It's very hard to say what you would do. We need more troops on the ground. General...

MR. RUSSERT: American troops if necessary?

REP. PELOSI: ...Shinseki said this from the start, when you make an appraisal about whether you're going to war, you have to know what you need.

MR. RUSSERT: So you would put more American troops on the ground?

REP. PELOSI: What I'm saying to you, that we need more troops on the ground. I think it would be better if we could get them to be not American, that we could appeal to our European allies, NATO. I agree with Senator Kerry in that respect to come...

MR. RUSSERT: But if they say no, would you put more American troops on the ground?

REP. PELOSI: Clear and present danger facing the United States is terrorism. We have to solidify, we have to stabilize the situation in Iraq. As secretary of state has said, "You break it, you own it." We have a responsibility now in Iraq there. And we have to get more troops on the ground. But when General Shinseki said we need 300,000 troops, Secretary Wolfowitz said "wildly off the mark," because they knew a commitment of 300,000 troops would not be acceptable to the American people. So they went in with false assumptions about rose petals, not rocket-propelled grenades, and we're in this fix that we're in now.

MR. RUSSERT: Well, let's assume all that is wrong. In order to stabilize the situation, NATO has said they have no troops for Iraq, the French, the Germans and Russians saying no.

REP. PELOSI: We have to send...

MR. RUSSERT: Would you send more American troops in order to stabilize the situation?

REP. PELOSI: Yes.

The complete transcript is available here.

Pelosi's spokeswoman claims there is no inconsistency between what Pelosi told Russert and the Speaker's current position of threatening to deny funds for any "escalation" in the number of troops:

"You also have to compare and contrast the situation in the war in Iraq," spokeswoman Jennifer Crider told FOXNews.com on Tuesday.

I'll get to that in a minute, but first a little background on U.S. troop levels in Iraq. Conventional wisdom, as indicated in Pelosi's Meet The Press quote, is that we went in to Iraq with too few troops. The officaial rebuttall of this memme is that the Generals got what they asked for:

Since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the civilian leadership at DoD has relied heavily on the advice of commanders on the ground -- those who lead and see daily operations firsthand -- to determine troop levels.

Secretary Rumsfeld supported troop levels as high as 400,000 if they were needed during the initial planning of the war.

U.S. CENTCOM Commander Gen. Tommy Franks decided to launch a campaign that emphasized speed rather than mass. This was designed to bring down the Hussein regime quickly, and thus prevent many of the possible negative consequences of invasion that were widely predicted at the time, such as:

Saddam Hussein’s deliberate burning of oil fields.

Large-scale refugee flows.

Food or medical humanitarian crises.

Destabilization of neighboring countries because of a protracted war.

The civilian and military leadership have had to balance the tension between having enough troops to provide the security necessary for economic and political progress to go forward, while not having so many troops that it breeds Iraqi resentment and dependency. It is a difficult question in which fair minded people can disagree. But to point to “more troops” as a panacea for Iraq’s difficulties is simplistic and does not take into account realities on the ground.

In his memoirs, General Franks wrote, at page 333:

As I concluded my summary of the existing 1003 plan, I noted that we’d trimmed planned force levels from 500,000 troops to around 400,000. But even that was still way too large, I told the secretary.

Franks also notes on a number of occasions that rather than “rejecting” military advice, Secretary Rumsfeld repeatedly listened to commanders’ advice in designing a plan for Iraq. On page 313, for example, Franks wrote, “Don Rumsfeld was a hard taskmaster – but he never tried to control the tactics of our war-fight.”

On July 9, 2003, Gen. Franks said in Senate testimony that "We have about 145,000 troops" in Iraq. Since then, the troop level base line has been 138,000. In April 2004, Rumsfeld said there were about 135,000 troops in Iraq. In November 2004 Secretary Rumsfeld told American Forces Press Service there were 140,000 troops in Iraq.

In 2005 U.S. troop levels in Iraq were temporarily boosted from around 138,000 to about 160,000 to provide extra security for the Oct. 15 constitutional referendum and the Dec. 15 nationwide elections. By January 2006 the numbers were back to 138,000. In October 2006, there were 141,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

Back to the context of Pelosi's call for more troops. When Pelosi called for more troops in Iraq, the military was in the middle of a troop rotation that was planned to reduce U.S. troop numbers in Iraq to 110,000. This was also when U.S. forces were removing anti-coalition forces from Fallujah. It doesn't appear that the planned decrease occurred. I haven’t found any report that the numbers did in fact decrease. So maybe Pelosi got her way in 2004.

That doesn’t make her consistent now.