Bush Has No Answers for Soldiers on Redeployment Questions

President Bush, answering questions posed by U.S. servicemen in the military publication Stars and Stripes, said that he basically had no idea how many times servicemen could expect to be redeployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, and admitted that he has yet to go to even one funeral for a soldier killed in either of those theaters.

Editor & Publisher:

When Stars and Stripes nabbed an exclusive interview with President Bush on July 4—aboard Air Force One—it devoted most of the questions to ones submitted by service members.

One, put to the commander-in-chief by the newspaper’s Jeff Schogol: Has he attended even one funeral for a fallen soldier from Iraq? No, he replied. “Because which funeral do you go to? In my judgment, I think if I go to one I should go to all. How do you honor one person but not another?” he said.

A soldier now serving in Iraq asked how many times he would have to return to the war zone in the next five years. Bush said he did not know. “The conditions on the ground will determine our troop levels, and one of the main conditions on the ground is the capacity for the Iraqis to take the fight to the enemy, and therefore it is very difficult for me to predict with certainty how many times this particular person would be sent back to Iraq,” Bush said, in the article published on Wednesday.

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From amvets.org

A World War II-era soldier reads Stars and Stripes