In For The Long Haul

We've dispensed with the fiction that if we just train the Iraqi Army, we'll be out of Iraq in no time:

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 [...]

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 [...]

President Bush first announced the training strategy in the summer of 2005.

"Our strategy can be summed up this way," Bush said. "As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down."

Military leaders in Baghdad planned to train 325,000 Iraqi security forces. Once that was accomplished, those forces were to take control. Casey created military transition teams that would live side by side with their Iraqi counterparts to help them apply their training to real-world situations.

Throughout 2006, Casey and top Bush administration leaders touted the training as a success, asserting that eight of Iraq's 10 divisions had taken the lead in confronting insurgents.

The problem was never going to be solved by training. There is no coalition of "anti-violence" in Iraq right now. The British just handed over control in Maysan province to the same Shiite militia that we're fighting in Diwaniya. The Shiites are fighting the Sunnis. The Sunnis are fighting the Shiites. The Kurds are kicking the Arabs out of Kirkuk and that whole situation is about to spill over into yet another war zone. And everyone's fighting the US forces.

Essentially, what this article says is that we're going to dig in and occupy Iraq even more strongly, while still not putting the forces on the ground necessary to actually do that (it'd take half a million). Meanwhile we're doing things like building walls between Sunni and Shiite areas, which didn't work when we tried it years ago. What we're REALLY doing in Iraq is rowing in place, a metaphor made all too real in this Needlenose post:

For the past week, I've been thinking about what to do with this copy of Baghdad Weekly (PDF - 2.3MB) Swopa forwarded to me. The Weekly is the official newsletter of the MWR (Morale, Welfare, and Recreation) program run by Halliburton's KBR division inside Baghdad's Green Zone (they're hiring, btw.)

Trouble is, I can't get past a page 1 story on a recent rowing relay race called the Tigris 6K. I don't know about you, but when I hear about a rowing race on the Tigris, I think of boats, water, and a river in Iraq. The actual race, however, involved stationary bikes rowing machines on asphalt, surrounded by concrete blast walls and guardposts. Ironically, the Tigris river itself is literally on the other side of the protective walls.

If that doesn't sound like the British playing tennis behind the walls of the consulate in the Punjab, I don't know what does. And it will be greeted with the same result; an eventual driving out of the colonial power.

This was written a while ago by an Iraqi, but it captures the full spirit of what we've accomplished after 4 years in Iraq:

Iraqis became more courageous and fearless because they used to the daily killing by all the types of the gunmen including Iraqi army, US army, insurgents, thieves and the security companies.

Some Iraqis became cleverer and they started to invent new ways in killing each other, stealing each other, hiding weapons, kidnapping and cheating.

We have more ministers than any other country on this crazy earth. We have even useless ministries which were invented to please some political parties. We have as far as I know 36 ministries while the USA has only 15 ministries. So we have more than double. I couldn’t know almost 30 of them because they don’t show on TV and we have no idea about their work or whether they do some work or not. In fact and as far as I knew, most of them have no idea about the work of the ministries they run.

Iraqis never feel afraid of the electric shocks because we have electricity power for only two hours a day or three hours as a maximum. The rest of the day we have to use small Chinese generator that cost something like 100 $ which are not really powerful enough to kill people.

Iraqis found new ways to save almost everything and the most important thing is the fuel which costs Iraqis fortune. Because the ministry of oil increased the prices of the fuel many times, Iraqis started to invent ways of saving the fuel like mixing one type of fuel with another one which is cheaper to save some dollars or using the cars and the electricity generator for limited times like using the car only to go to work and using the generator only at night. To be honest, until now, I don’t know why we suffer of fuel shortage although our officials and specially our minister of oil who knows nothing about oil always boast that we are one of the richest oil country and we have the best oil qualities and the cheapest extracting costs.

We have the largest number of blast walls which I believe that can form three matches of China great walls. Each ministry blocks the roads that lead to its building with tens of these walls. I think that the cement used in these blast walls is enough to build 1000 skyscrapers.

We have the biggest number of the bodyguards in the world. Each minister has not less than 15 4 wheel cars carrying at least 5 bodyguards. Each of the 275 members of the Iraqi parliament has the same number of the bodyguards and some of them (the heads of the political blocs) has even more than that. By the way, I didn’t count the bodyguards of the presidential committee members, the prime minister and his two deputies and the parliament president and his two deputies because they have foreign bodyguards.

And we're going to double these achievements, by taking the Iraqi forces out of the equation and fully becoming the French in Algeria.