Salon: Deployment Of Wounded Troops Tied To Bush's Iraq Escalation!

After interviewing a dozen soldiers, Mark Benjamin is today reporting in Salon that the Army is deploying seriously injured troops to Fort Irwin, California:

Military experts say they suspect that the deployment to Fort Irwin of injured soldiers was an effort to pump up manpower statistics used to show the readiness of Army units. With the military increasingly strained after four years of war, Army readiness has become a critical part of the debate over Iraq. Some congressional Democrats have considered plans to limit the White House's ability to deploy more troops unless the Pentagon can certify that units headed into the fray are fully equipped and fully manned.

It's a harrowing story, and Benjamin has already reported that some injured soldiers were being reclassified from medically unfit to fit, so they could be sent back to Iraq!

This abuse of service personnel is being directly tied to the Bush Administration's escalation of the Iraq War:

A military official knowledgeable about the training in California in January and the medical processing of the injured soldiers at Fort Benning in February told Salon that commanders were taking desperate actions to meet an accelerated deployment schedule dictated by President Bush's so-called surge plan for securing Baghdad. "None of this would have happened if we had just slowed down a little bit," the military official said. "A lot of people were under a lot of pressure at that time."

Of course, as Sidney Blumenthal has already reported in Salon:

Deep within the bowels of the Pentagon, policy planners are conducting secret meetings to discuss what to do in the worst-case scenario in Iraq about a year from today if and when President Bush's escalation of more than 20,000 troops fails, a participant in those discussions told me. None of those who are taking part in these exercises, shielded from the public view and the immediate scrutiny of the White House, believes that the so-called surge will succeed. On the contrary, everyone thinks it will not only fail to achieve its aims but also accelerate instability by providing a glaring example of U.S. incapacity and incompetence.

And the military says it will still need these escalated troop numbers into 2008!

New York Times:

The day-to-day commander of American forces in Iraq has recommended that the heightened American troop levels there be maintained through February 2008, military officials said Wednesday.

So, a desperate military command is resorting to the redeployment of injured troops and downgraded recruitment standards in order to find the cannon fodder for Bush's continuing disaster. It's little wonder that the Army is under-reporting desertion rates; and little wonder that, as the Washington Post reported:

Four years after the invasion of Iraq, the high and growing demand for U.S. troops there and in Afghanistan has left ground forces in the United States short of the training, personnel and equipment that would be vital to fight a major ground conflict elsewhere, senior U.S. military and government officials acknowledge.

More troubling, the officials say, is that it will take years for the Army and Marine Corps to recover from what some officials privately have called a "death spiral," in which the ever more rapid pace of war-zone rotations has consumed 40 percent of their total gear, wearied troops and left no time to train to fight anything other than the insurgencies now at hand.

It just keeps getting worse.