When Will Iraq Army Stand Up?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Military, The World, WarEspecially since a new story reports that training them isn’t one of our priorities now.
WASHINGTON – 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.
This is extremely significant, because I think we’re all well aware that you can’t “defeat” the insurgents in a traditional sense. We can only batter them down enough so Iraqis can take over and we can get the hell out of Dodge. Because more keep popping up every single day, and as such, you can only control provinces for so long until they become unstable again.
What we need (and have always needed) is much, much more manpower, and that’s only going to come in the form of more US troops or well-trained Iraqi troops. I think we all prefer the latter.
The Pentagon says that the policy hasn’t changed, 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.
If they really aren’t allocating any additional resources to get more Iraqis to fight for their country, it’s highly unlikely that this surge will have any effect beyond a small break in an otherwise deadly, continuous storm.
This entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 and is filed under Military, The World, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 21st, 2007 at 1:39 am
This is not a policy change. This is a budget issue.
MNSTC-I ran out of money on 1 Apr for the training an Equipping of IA units. Funding for 33,000 more IA support troops is hung up in the FY07sup that Congress is playing games with. While the US military budget can be juggled for US forces, funding of foreing military is legally seperated and they cannot transfer funds from US Mil to IA. Four different Generals have mentioned this detail in last 3 weeks. Funding for standing up IA is on hold until FY07sup gets resolved. First mention of this is in this brief:
Apr05: “At the current moment, because of this lack of funding, MNSTC-I is unable to continue at the pace they were in the developmental process of the Iraqi security forces,” Caldwell said. “It is starting to have some impact today, and will only have more of an impact over time.” http://www.defendamerica.mil/pdf/200704/20070404CALDWELL.pdf