By RICHARD SISK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Saturday, November 29th, 2003
WASHINGTON - Arriving in Baghdad hours after President Bush's star turn, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) said yesterday the troops were happy to meet her, too. "It's a positive for the commander-in-chief to visit troops in the field," Clinton said, yet "the troops [also] seemed to appreciate seeing myself" and Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) on their joint trip to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Clinton and Reed, both members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, quickly turned from faintly praising Bush for his surprise Thanksgiving drop-in at Baghdad's airport to ripping his handling of the Iraq war and the transition to democracy.
In a conference call from the region, Clinton, who voted in the Senate for the Iraq war resolution, charged that Bush failed to commit enough troops for the invasion and the increasingly bloody occupation effort.
"The Pentagon tried to make do with as few troops as possible, as light a footprint as they could get away with," Clinton said. "Now, we're playing catchup."
She added that the government's Iraq policy was mishandled by Bush administration officials who have been "obsessed with [deposed Iraqi leader] Saddam Hussein for more than a decade."
"Unfortunately, I don't think they fully appreciated the conditions we would encounter," Clinton said.
Reed, who voted against the war resolution, renewed his call for more troops to be committed to Iraq and for more troops to be recruited for the war against terror groups in the future.
"There's no question in my mind we need a larger Army," said Reed, a West Point graduate and former paratrooper.
The two senators, who stayed in Kuwait last night but will visit U.S. troops in the Iraqi oil town of Kirkuk today, also questioned the Bush administration plan to hold elections for a new Iraqi government by June.
Clinton said the support of the majority Shiite community in Iraq was "still a big if. The obstacles and problems are much greater than the administration usually admits to."
The former First Lady said the morale of the troops she met from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division was high, but they were concerned about how their mission was perceived back home.
She said she told the troops "Americans are proud" of them, "but many question the administration's policies."
The former first lady, who is now a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said she had "wanted to come to Iraq to let the troops know about the great job they're doing".She said she had supported the Bush administration's massive 87-billion dollar supplementary defence budget to pay for its operations in Afghanistan and Iraq but added she would have structured it differently.
Fellow senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, who has been accompanying Clinton on her tour and previously visited Iraq in July, said his visits had confirmed his opposition to the US-led war.
"This isn't the right approach," he said. "The longer we're unable to suppress the violence, the quicker the Iraqis will become impatient with our presence. And the level of violence has accelerated dramatically."