Bredesen in Iraq

Governor Phil Bredesen is visiting Tennessee troops in the Middle East this week.  He’s part of a bipartisan delegation of four governors getting a first-hand look at the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since arriving last night, the Governor has shared meals with Tennessee guardsmen in Kuwait, met with America’s top-ranked officials in Iraq, and visited troops stationed in Baghdad and Ramadi. Tomorrow he will head to Afghanistan.

Right now, between 600 and 800 members of the Tennessee National guard are in Iraq and Kuwait, and another hundred or so are in Afghanistan. Bredesen says he’d hoped to visit last summer, when about 4-thousand members of Tennessee’s 278^th Regimental Combat Team were in the region. He says he’s happy to have so many troops home, but worries that some of the items that they had to leave behind will be missed if the state suffers a large-scale disaster.

“The people are coming back, but the equipment isn’t. There’s a lot of equipment that the engineering groups, for example, have brought over, about a half a billion dollars worth of equipment which is precisely the kind of equipment that you would like to have in a major earthquake.  I mean, it’s bulldozers and earthmovers and dumptrucks, all that kind of heavy construction equipment.”

Bredesen says he’s seen the toll conditions in the Middle East take on machinery, and agrees that it doesn’t make sense to transport them back to the United States.  He says he’s working with the National Governor’s Association to lobby the federal government for new equipment to replace what’s been left behind.