Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces.
Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration's Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said.
No change has been announced, and a Pentagon spokesman, Col. Gary Keck, said training Iraqis remains important. "We are just adding another leg to our mission," Keck said, referring to the greater U.S. role in establishing security that new troops arriving in Iraq will undertake.
But evidence has been building for months that training Iraqi troops is no longer the focus of U.S. policy. Pentagon officials said they know of no new training resources that have been included in U.S. plans to dispatch 28,000 additional troops to Iraq. The officials spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they aren't authorized to discuss the policy shift publicly. Defense Secretary Robert Gates made no public mention of training Iraqi troops on Thursday during a visit to Iraq.
I've long thought that the whole thing about "training Iraqi troops" was horseshit. The notion that there are legions of Iraqis willing and ready to pacify Iraq, but golly darn, they just don't know how to do it, is arrogant and absurd. Do Americans really know how to pacify Iraq? Well... the evidence, let's say, weighs against that proposition.
If only we could train the turtles to swim like us ducks, then the pond would be free!
Iraqis quite obviously know how to fight and are quite obviously very willing to fight. They just have no allegiance to the US installed government and are not willing to fight for it. Kurds will fight for Kurds, Sunnis for Sunnis, Shia for Shia -- and that's only speaking very broadly and not taking into account the myriad other loyalties and coalitions which form the Iraqi reality.
Sorry, but the US can't win this and never could have unless we were willing to do a full-fledged occupation and imperial transformation of the culture. And since that was never in the cards, what the fuck was ever the point?
I do credit the Bushites for one thing. I've enough unregenerate Fenianism in me to have a reflexive suspicion of Empire. But this administration has taught me that as bad as imperialism may be, entirely half-assed incompetent neo-imperialism is a fuck of a lot worse.
