Delaware Senator Joe Biden, previously known for stealing entire childhood episodes from British Labour politicians, makes a decent case for using US troops as peacekeepers in Afghanistan. Frankly, other than the Brits and maybe the Canadians, I don’t trust anyone else with the job.
But there’s one little issue that keeps me from agreeing with the good senator. We’re stretched too damn thin.
This is a long war and when we get to dealing with Iraq it’s going to be a much bigger war.
The bad news is, we don’t have the Army that deployed to Saudi in 1990-91. VII Corps was disbanded almost immediately after, V Corps is spread out all over southern and central Europe…hell, even our armored cav regiments have been stripped of most of their armor. The good news is, it won’t take seven, eight, or nine US heavy divisions to topple Saddam. But the occupation WILL take a lot of foot soldiers. US foot soldiers. No one else can do that job. The Germans have a bad history there, the French would spend all their time simultaneously on their knees and trying to pickpocket, the Brits just don’t have the manpower, don’t even mention the Russians, and the Canadian military just makes people giggle. Even the Canadians. (Mark Steyn excepted — he’s mad as hell and not gonna take it any more.)
So, we can’t be sending our warmakers to Afghanistan to act as peacekeepers. Sorry, Joe.
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