Opinion> Roger Simon> Blank Check For Iraq Needed At Home

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"Blank check" for Iraq needed at home

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., wants the head of the U.S. National Guard to become a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff so that the Guard can get the funding and equipment it needs to protect Americans as well as Iraqis.

"We wrote a blank check for Iraq," Leahy told Washington newspaper The Politico in a phone interview on Monday. "The Iraqi National Guard seems to have a direct pipeline for whatever it wants. I'd like the U.S. National Guard to have a pipeline."

The drain of Guard manpower and equipment to the Middle East is coming under new scrutiny as recent tornadoes and wildfires in this country have strained the Guard's ability to respond. And hurricane season is just two weeks away.

"The head of the National Guard should sit with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and debate with them," Leahy told me. "This is not a question of motivation. The Guard is motivated. But they are short so much equipment and so much manpower, they will be unable to respond as they should to a significant problem at home."

Leahy says the Guard is underfunded by $24 billion and there currently are "no plans to buy the 18,000 needed Humvees, no plans to obtain the 30,000 medium-sized trucks, no plans to purchase the 12,000 required generators, no plans to purchase the 62,000 communications sets" that the Guard needs in this country.

Leahy and Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., want not only to put the head of the National Guard at the same table with the Joint Chiefs, they also want the Guard to have a say in what kind of equipment it buys.

Though the public associates the National Guard with the individual 50 states, it is actually a component of the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force, and its funding comes through the Pentagon.

And Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Peter Pace said last year that giving the Guard a seat at the table would be "disruptive" and "not helpful."

Translation: The boys in the club don't want the club to get any bigger.

They like things just the way they are.

But how well are things? The California National Guard, which helps fight forest fires, is severely underequipped because of the Iraq war.

According to a recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle: "Guidelines suggest the Guard should have 39 diesel generators on hand, but it has none. Guidelines suggest having 1,410 of a certain type of Global Positioning Satellite device; the Guard has none of those."

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, said last week as wildfires ravaged his state, "A lot of equipment has gone to Iraq, and it doesn't come back when the troops come back."

North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley, a Democrat, said in a conference call Monday that far from having all the equipment he needs for the Guard at home, he has had to send state funds to Iraq. "A general called from Iraq during the first deployment and said he had 5,000 (North Carolina Guard troops) and 50 radios," Easley said. "So we bought radios out of state funds. And we gathered up as much body armor as we could to protect the thin-skinned vehicles."

On the Senate floor last week, Leahy said the White House's claim that Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas had all the Guard resources she needed to respond to the recent floods and tornadoes in her state "is just absurd on a number of levels."

"The reality is that Guard faces real, incontrovertible shortfalls in vital equipment," Leahy said.

On Monday, Leahy said: "The Iraq war has been going on longer than World War II, and all indications are it will be going on for some time to come. The problem of the Guard has been neglected for too long."

But just as previous presidents have said the United States could afford both guns and butter during wartime, our current president says the Guard can be fully operational in Iraq without any significant loss of effectiveness at home.

As HBO's Bill Maher said recently, however: "You can't send the National Guard to Iraq and then claim it's still here. Sorry, Mr. President, but the last documented case of National Guardsmen able to be in two places at one time was you."

To find out more about Roger Simon, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.