By Vicki Allen – Thu Jun 30, 5:17 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Several Senate Republicans denounced other lawmakers and the news media on Thursday for unfavorable depictions of the Iraq war and the Pentagon urged members of Congress to talk up military service to help ease a recruiting shortfall.
Families are discouraging young men and women from enlisting “because of all the negative media that’s out there,” Sen. James Inhofe (news, bio, voting record), an Oklahoma Republican, said at a U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.
Inhofe also said that other senators’ criticism of the war contributed to the propaganda of U.S. enemies. He did not name the senators.
Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker urged members of Congress to use “your considerable influence to explain to the American people and to those that are influencers out there how important it is for our young people to serve this nation at a time like this.”
The Army on Wednesday said it was 14 percent, or about 7,800 recruits, behind its year-to-date recruitment target even though it exceeded its monthly target in June. With extended deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, recruiting also is down for the National Guard and the Reserves.
“With the deluge of negative news that we get daily, it’s just amazing to me that anybody would want to sign up,” said Sen. Pat Roberts (news, bio, voting record), a Kansas Republican.
Facing flagging support for the Iraq war that has killed about 1,750 U.S. forces, President Bush in a speech on Tuesday acknowledged the nation’s doubts about the strategy but insisted the operation was worthwhile and portrayed Iraq as a key battlefield against terrorists.
Bush himself made a pitch for military service. “We live in freedom because every generation has produced patriots willing to serve a cause greater than themselves. Those who serve today are taking their rightful place among the greatest generations that have worn our nation’s uniform,” he said.
While Bush has rejected calls for a timetable to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, Virginia Republican Sen. John Warner (news, bio, voting record), the committee chairman, pressed the Pentagon to declassify information on progress of training Iraq’s forces, considered a key indicator of when U.S. forces can return home.
“The American taxpayer put a tremendous investment in that retraining and the equipping,” Warner said. With that information, he said, “We can better translate where we are in terms of hopefully providing them (Iraqis) with trained individuals and equipment to eventually replace our forces.”
Democrats questioned the Pentagon officials on how the Iraq war has strained the military’s readiness for other potential conflicts and on delays in providing troops with adequate armor against car bombs and other explosives.
Sen. Edward Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), a Massachusetts Democrat, said while Bush urged Americans “to raise flags” in honor of U.S. troops in Iraq, the president did not assure troops “they will have the equipment they need to fight the war, and he should have.”
Schoomaker acknowledged up to 25 percent of the Humvees in Iraq still had the low grade of protective armor, but he said all should be equipped with higher grade armor in September.
He also agreed that in some cases the level of readiness of units was below desired levels because of the strain of the Iraq conflict and the Army’s efforts to streamline its operations.
In his testimony, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Michael Hagee said readiness for battalion and squadron-sized Marine units had dropped by 40 percent because of the priority put on sustaining units in Iraq at the expense of the units that had rotated out of the war.
There you go – the right wing is blaming the media already. If this is going to be the thing, let’s pull them out now and call it a day. I’m tired of this ‘blame everyone else’ shit from Republicans!
no twins yet? I’m still on vacation. I go in tomorrow so I haven’t checked my work email.
Tomorrow at 1:30 we go in, and we’ll be at the South Shore Hospital for 4 days. Eric, you and Jackie should come down and meet the boys one of those days. We’re leaving right now to have a preliminary appt….about 26 hours away now!
holly s#$%…its getting close…i’ll talk to jacqui and see if she has some time…maybe you can call me when you are at the hospital and let me know what day is good…or we can swing by the house in the next week?
She said the group is going to Iraq to support American troops, who see a disconnection with what they experience and what’s being reported in the United States. She said the incongruence is leading to “morale problems.”
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,161463,00.html
This article talks about trying to keep th media from sabotaging the War on Terror like they did in Vietnam.
So Buzz considers Iraq ‘stabalized’? You know what this is here, Right. They’re going to go over there with preconceived notions and planed rhetoric – they’ll remain in the green zone at all times – and be driven to and fro in armored buses.
They’ll come back and say the same exact thing they would have said if they hadn’t gone at all.
What pisses these people off is that ‘journalism’ is still legal in this country. When they pick up an article that doesn’t say what they want to hear, they call it biased. It’s the way of the world now here in America…if you don’t like it, send it back…the media has become Burger King – and with folks like these talking heads doing what they’re doing here, they’re making sure that the public can ‘have it our way’.
There’s a market for sunny characterizations of the war, and everyone in the country could die from a nuclear explosion and the next day they’d be on the air spinning it to equal whatever the audience wants to hear coming out of their speakers.
The folks out there who still think that Vietnam could have been won are LOSERS, who need to get over it and start living in reality. I’m quite sure that there are Frenchmen who insist that Napolean never lost up in Russia, or Germans who figure that Hitler is still alive somewhere and the Germans will rule the world eventually…hell, there’s probably Japanese out there who think they would have won WW2 if it wasn’t for the bomb…
There are always going to be a group of nationalistic morons out there who are all too comfortable with tearing the history books to shreads and writing their own instead, but for God’s sake, we sure have a shit-load of feedbags for these people in America don’t we?!?! There’s a feedbag for revisionist history in every market throughout this country…talk show hosts like Buzz and Rush who will make up any version of American history they feel like, and there’re thousands of schmucks out there willing to believe every word.
I know people, as do you and others, who are fighting this war over there – and the scene being described in a truthfull way is important to me and to them. A realistic view of this thing is what THEY deserve!
These right-wing talkers only care about what the LISTENERS want! If they get into Baghdad and it’s craters and garbage all over the streets, them getting shot at a few times on the way in…are they going to tell that story? You know they won’t…they’re making this trip in hopes of being alive to get back and tell the story they’ve written already.
They’ll find soldiers willing to launder their point of view…just like the president loads up his ‘town hall’ meetings with like-minded people, and they’ll give the public what they want.
Their listeners don’t want to hear about a stop-loss policy, rising US death toll, terrorist training programs in Iraq, 18 month tours, expired food being fed to the troops…those are all stories, but they don’t WANT TO HEAR IT. Very different from what they’re alledging in this article.
It’s as if the news is merely fabricated…it’s as if the articles these people are writing come from the depths of their imagination and from no place else.
Fuck that! I for one am tired of the right-wing making it up as they go along, then pointing the finger everywhere but at themselves when something goes wrong. We need better than this, and the folks out there who just want to believe a certain thing, regardless of reality…well they’re already trained on who to blame if all this turns to shit…sure won’t be the Republican leadership, that’s for sure.
By design of course…but as wrong as two little boys kissing!
(Note: We’re giving birth to the boys tomorrow, hence the ‘rant and rave’ mode I seem to be in…nerves are shot)
Simple question…do you think we see the whole story about Iraq? The problem is that ‘journalists’ are forced to find “sensational” news, or risk not being published. Good things in iraq aren’t as sensationalistic as car bombs, and therefore aren’t reported…at all. I’ve not heard one report on progress, not seen one front page article on progress…haven’t heard much ‘good’ news since Saddaam’s capture. Give me one article that made it to the front page of the New York times that held a postive opinion of our troops, not the war, not Bush, or the conditions in Iraq, but just an article on how capable and able our troops are…one front page article…can you find one? The person who spurred these people to go to Iraq, and report on more than just suicide attacks, was a general, who was ushering two washington post journalist around in northern Iraq…these two journalist were trying to fill the market for “bad news” in Iraq, and decided to snub the generals progress, because they didn’t see any craters or garbage all over the street. There is no room for good news in american media, that would be murderous to the lefts war on the war in iraq…i suppose, kinda reminds me of the point I made on google groups, good news is bad news to the left.