Reserves may be tapped More call-ups possible due to lack of foreign aid

WASHINGTON – The United States may have to alert thousands more National Guard and Reserve troops within weeks that they are needed for duty in Iraq, the Pentagon’s second-ranking general said Wednesday.

The Bush administration still hopes that Turkey, India, Pakistan or South Korea will contribute thousands of troops for security duty in Iraq, said Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

But military planners are not counting on it.

“Hope is not a plan,” Pace said in an interview with a group of reporters at a Washington hotel.

Although reservists are called upon to serve in every overseas conflict, the scope of their involvement and length of their duty in Iraq has raised politically sensitive questions about whether the Bush administration is asking citizen soldiers to shoulder too much of the burden.

The United States has about 130,000 troops in Iraq, of which at least 20,000 are National Guard and Reserve.

Of the 302 U.S. troops who have died in Iraq since the war began, at least 47 were National Guard or Reserve.

An additional call-up is more likely if the administration falls short of its goal of persuading other countries to contribute a total of 10,000 to 15,000 troops for security duty in Iraq. The Pentagon needs to know soon whether it can count on them being there early in 2004.

Thus, decisions about activating reserves are coming soon – because waiting longer would cut into the mobilization and training time they would need to deploy early next year.

“We need to be making decisions about alerting reservists over the next four to six weeks,” Pace said.

President Bush did not receive any offers of troops for Iraq during two days of meetings with foreign leaders at the United Nations this week, said a senior U.S. official, who added that the question of sending troops did not even come up during Bush’s talks with the leaders of Pakistan and India.

The United States will continue seeking a new U.N. resolution designed to encourage other countries to send troops, but it may take months to work out, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., said the prospect of additional reservists being called up for duty in Iraq reflects the administration’s failure to build an adequate international coalition.

“More American families now face possible separation because of the failed diplomacy of the Bush administration,” he said. “The president’s go-at-it-alone policy has not encouraged foreign leaders to send their troops to Iraq to assist our men and women, who are stretched thin.”

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told a Senate committee Wednesday that U.S. allies are likely to commit only a limited number of forces beyond a British-led international division that is operating in southern Iraq and a Polish-led division that recently replaced a U.S. Marine division.

“We’re not going to get a lot of international troops with or without a U.N. resolution,” Rumsfeld said. “I think somewhere between zero and 10,000 or 15,000 is probably the ballpark.”

Pace, in his comments, referred to possibly mobilizing National Guard and Reserve units beyond those already identified as part of the U.S. plan for rotating forces in Iraq.

“It’s not a given that the force would have to be Reserve or Guard,” he added. It could be an active-duty Army or Marine force, although they are stretched thin with worldwide commitments.