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Thomas Ricks:

The strategy in Iraq, President Bush has said often over the past year, is to stand down the U.S. military as Iraq's security forces stand up.

By strict numbers, the Iraqi side of that equation is almost complete. Training programs have developed more than 300,000 members of the Iraqi army and national police, close to the desired number of homegrown forces. Yet as that number has grown, so, too, has violence in Iraq. The summer was worse than ever, with July the deadliest month in three years, according to U.S. military data.

With the insurgency undiminished and Iraqi forces seemingly unable to counter it, U.S. commanders say they expect to stay at the current level of U.S. troops -- about 140,000 -- until at least next spring. That requirement is placing new strains on service members who leave Iraq and then must prepare to return a few months later. Tours of duty have been extended for two brigades in Iraq to boost troop levels.

So is the "stand down as they stand up" policy defunct? Not according to the Bush administration. But the meaning of the phrase appears to have changed, as leaders have begun shifting the blame for Iraq's problems away from the U.S. military and onto the country's own social and governmental institutions.

When Bush began invoking "stand up, stand down" in 2005, he repeatedly indicated that he was talking about getting Iraqi defense forces trained and on the job. For example, on Nov. 15, he said, "The plan [is] that we will train Iraqis, Iraqi troops, to be able to take the fight to the enemy. And as I have consistently said, as the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down."

More recently, Bush has insisted that "the 'stand up, stand down' still holds." But he added more conditions, saying the troops can come home "when our commanders say . . . the Iraqi government is capable of defending itself and sustaining itself and governing itself."

Military officers and other experts interviewed in recent days said that the Iraqi training program has worked but that its success is undercut by the lack of strong Iraqi political leadership. "You fix the government, you fix the problem," said an Army battalion commander who has seen hard fighting near Baghdad this summer.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld landed squarely in this camp recently. Referring to numbers of trained Iraqi forces, he told a reporter: "If we look at it one-dimensionally like that, there's no answer to the question, because the problem is not a military problem. In fact, the reality is that it's a political governance problem, and it's a governmental problem, and it's a problem of reconciliation."

In this view, it doesn't matter how many Iraqi troops are trained if there is no government to lead them. "I believe that you could have a million Iraqis within the Iraqi security forces and still be ineffective against the insurgents," said an Army colonel who recently returned from a year in Iraq.

"Stand up, stand down" was a great slogan, but as a policy it was largely meaningless. The troops we have trained are under-prepared, unreliable, and worst of all, quite possibly responsible for the recent escalation of violence.

Go read the second half of the article for yourself. Read what the military, rather than political officials, have to say about the training of Iraqi troops. Unless you're willing to start saying that the US military itself is part of the problem, you have to take these claims seriously. Here's just one of the many provided by Ricks:

"To the degree that 'standing up' a Shia-dominated force is perceived as a security threat to Sunnis, you get a stronger and stronger reaction the more you stand up," said Frank Hoffman, a strategic expert and retired Marine officer. "This may account for what you are seeing -- the sense that national institutions that do not reflect political concerns will produce more violent reactions and a greater reliance on local militias."

Slogans win elections, but they don't win wars. When will that sink in?