U.S. Troop Levels: A Bush Shell Game

[gulliver]

I always find Bush's pat answer about troop counts in Iraq fishy.

Most recently in his Fort Bragg speech, Bush said: "If our commanders on the ground say we need more troops, I will send them."

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/06/20050628-7.html

He always talks about how many "troops" the commanders in the field request. But what if the commanders aren't actually requesting "troops?" What about contractors? No one ever asks Bush about how many contractors we are paying for.

Currently there are about 140,000 troops in Iraq. That number is easy to find. For example,

http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/06/29/bush.speech.ap/

But I'm finding it very hard to find an estimate of the count of contractors in Iraq. If no one watches that number, then the contractors become an open-ended manpower slush fund, a place where Bush and Rumsfeld can hide their failure to estimate the total effort needed in Iraq.