With morale low among US troops in Iraq, Bush is being forced to launch a recruiting drive, writes Conor O'Clery
Yesterday I noticed that the incoming tenant of a former clothing shop in Chambers Street in lower Manhattan had put up an "Opening soon sign". In future it will be an army recruiting office, the first to be established in the district.
Persuading young Americans to sign up was easy a year ago when the memory of September 11th was fresh in people's minds. Now the US armed forces are overstretched, reservists are leaving when they can and the government is being forced to launch a recruiting drive nationwide. It will not be helped by the news yesterday of the shooting down of a Chinook helicopter, causing the biggest US casualty toll in Iraq in any one day.
In the last two weeks, 36 US service members have been killed in action, a level of attrition associated with another war with which the Pentagon hates to draw parallels - that in Vietnam which claimed 52,000 American lives.
In October, 33 US soldiers were killed in Iraq, twice the number in September and up to 250 injured, in attacks where they have had little chance to fight back.
Now in one day in November, more than half the October toll has been exceeded. The number of US military casualties since May 1st, when President Bush declared the end of major hostilities, is now more than the total killed in the battle to topple Saddam Hussein.
The Bush administration is so concerned about the rising death toll that it has banned the media from filming the arrival in the US of flag-draped coffins, the poignant sight that three decades ago helped turned public opinion against the war in Vietnam.
Every day the Last Post echoes sadly over cemeteries in large cities and small towns across the US as the American dead are buried. Every day the agony and apprehension among military families grows. Morale is low among troops on the ground. There have been 13 suicides among soldiers in Iraq in recent months and a rise in mental health crises, especially among reservists.
The Pentagon's planning assumed a speedily pacified Iraq and an inflow of international peacekeepers. With neither happening, it has had to rely on part-time soldiers to make up almost half the 134,000 US troops on the ground.
This means that the soldiers in Iraq facing a bloody insurgency are more likely to be married and older than the Vietnam conscripts of the 1960s. There have been more fatalities among over-25-year-olds than among under-22s, the group which made up 60 per cent of the Vietnam casualties.
Tens of thousands of reservists and members of the National Guard who signed up in recent years expecting that service abroad would be the exception rather than the rule find themselves serving for a year or more in a hostile environment where they do not speak the language.
One reservist in Pennsylvania, a forest ranger in his 50s, asked to be stood down just before the war - he had already done a year in Kosovo - only to be told that the president had signed an order that day freezing resignations.
He was killed when his Humvee crashed. His congressman told me that members of the House and Senate are now being inundated with letters from constituents to get their "weekend soldiers" home. Some 30 US troops went AWOL in the past four weeks rather than return to Iraq after a two-week leave back in the US. The home break was only instituted to cope with plummeting morale.
A further 30,000 reservists are awaiting the order to go to Iraq in the coming months. Worried about the rising discontent and anger among families, Congress last week passed a bill doubling the current death benefit to $12,000.
In the growing debate on "who lost Iraq?", questions are being raised about the decision of US administrator Paul Bremer, after consultation with the Pentagon, to dismantle the 500,000-strong Iraqi army - the very force that refused to fight for Saddam Hussein.
His predecessor, Jay Garner, wanted to keep the army largely intact to carry out reconstruction tasks.
Now the only exit strategy the Bush administration has is to reconstitute the old army, purged of Baathist leaders, and give security back to Iraqis. The decision to disband the standing army went against the advice of the US State Department, whose input on the conflict was consistently ignored by the Pentagon which is seen increasingly to have botched the occupation.
Stavro Ad-Dabbour Beirut