Growing Gap Between Field and Pentagon

In the president's Tuesday speech to rally the nation behind the continuing operations in Iraq, he reiterated his frequent claim that his generals in the Pentagon tell him the US has enough troops on the ground to achieve the president's goals. After the speech, Senator Biden said he had talked to commanders in the field in Iraq who overwhelmingly said they did not have enough troops on the ground.

Last week I linked to Fareed Zakaria's Newsweek summary of the current state of affairs in Iraq. Zakaria relates stories of the US Army engaging in nation building excercise, ignoring Secretary Rumsfeld's policy that they not.

These two examples illustrate quite clearly a growing gap in the military leadership between the desk jockeys in Washington, driven by politics and abstract ideology, and the troops in the field, driven by the realities of living in a hot zone. That is disturbing to me. It means the leadership behind the war effort is not all reading from the same playbook and ultimately suggests something of a breakdown in the quality and ability of that leadership. I fear this will be one of the president's legacies that will take years to fix.