Two extremely depressing but largely overlooked stories from Iraq over the last 48 hours.
First, this story from McClatchy about the training of Iraqi forces:
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.
In a reflection of the need for more U.S. troops, the Pentagon decided earlier this month to increase the length of U.S. Army tours in Iraq from 12 to 15 months. The extension came amid speculation that the U.S. commander there, Army Gen. David Petraeus, will ask that the troop increase be maintained well into 2008.
U.S. officials don't say that the training formula - championed by Gen. John Abizaid when he was the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and by Gen. George Casey when he was the top U.S. general in Iraq - was doomed from the start. But they said that rising sectarian violence and the inability of Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki to unite the country changed the conditions. They say they now must establish security while training Iraqi forces because ultimately, "they are our ticket out of Iraq," as one senior Pentagon official put it.
Then, there's this bit of reporting from Laura Rozen over at War and Piece:
National Journal's Congress Daily:
Pentagon lawyers abruptly blocked mid-level active-duty military officers from speaking Thursday during a closed-door House Armed Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee briefing about their personal experiences working with Iraqi security forces.
The Pentagon's last-minute refusal to allow the officers' presentations surprised panel members and congressional aides, who are in the middle of an investigation into the effort to train and organize Iraqi forces.Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Martin Meehan, D-Mass., called the Pentagon's move "outrageous" and left open the possibility of issuing subpoenas.
One correspondent suggests: "My guess: the training is not going well, there are some big gaps, and a bunch of horror stories that the Pentagon doesn't want aired. ... That said, this will backfire."
We were promised by this administration that the training of Iraqi forces was proceeding rapidly, and that we were nearing the day when they would be able to take over for us. Then the surge came, and although it wasn't clear precisely when and how Iraqi forces would be involved, the administration continued to claim that Iraqis were involved in many or even most of the operations. And now, this.
It isn't that I am surprised. I've been saying for nearly 2 years now that this project will never work because the idea of Iraq doesn't really mean that much to the people in the region. It simply isn't something that large numbers of them are willing to die for. So it doesn't surprise me that the training programs have failed.
Nevertheless, training has always been central to the promises this administration made to the American people. Now that the training programs have failed, rather than admit failure to the people, they are apparently trying to hide it.
So all that said, why is it that only McClatchy and National Journal seem to be covering this? Where is the rest of the media?
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