Yeah, suuuuuuuuuuuuure, Condi.
I mean, we’ve never had more than 160,000 troops in the country, and the normal level has been about 138,000. So if the Iraqis have half again that many, and they’re quality troops, then our job there is done. Right?
Anyone think they’d be able to fend off chaos if we left? Har, har!!
There are 227k ‘quality’ forces? Is she talking about the insurgency?
According to Condi, “quality” = “will not pee their pants at the sound of gunfire”.
Be glad to trade you some [DEL]ARVN[/DEL] Iraqi security force rifles.
Never been fired and only dropped once.
CMC
::snicker::
The actual number of Iraqi forces is almost impossible to tell. Sometimes as many as half or more of the force will simply QUIT on payday! They dont mind showing up to train for a couple weeks just to collect a quick paycheck. But there’s nothing keeping them from leaving, so they just jump on the truck after they get some cash. Fuckers.
Bolding mine. What’s so bad about that ? They’re probably forced into joining by how bad we screwed up the country, and what loyalty do they really owe a puppet government ? If they can screw us and feed their families at the same time, more power to them.
Looks like Condi’s also practicing to show she’s presidential timbre. If you’re gonna be the Prez, you’ve got to tell Presidential-sized lies, apparently.
Heh. I know people who are in Iraq right now, and they said they wouln’d trust the locals to guard an electronics store against an attack by the Amish.
Actually it means that after they do pee their pants they will keep on fighting.
Without defending what I consider to have been irresponsible and catastrophic recklessness on the part of the US in launching the war in Iraq with insufficient justification and inadequate postwar planning, I have to admit that I do consider it “bad” when a country’s professional military, which is supposed to be a reliable force for keeping the peace internally or protecting the country from external enemies, is largely composed of part-time mercenaries who are willing to desert as soon as they pick up their paychecks.
It may be understandable how this situation came about, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t bad.
The quality of the Iraqi forces has improved dramatically in the last few months. They haven’t run from a fight in a long time, and have taken the lead in many operations. There are areas of Iraq now that are entirely controlled by Iraqi forces.
However, there’s a difference between ‘quality’ forces and ‘forces that no longer need help’. The problem the Iraqis have is logistics. They don’t have heavy equipment and can’t keep large numbers of troops supplied in the field for any long period of time.
The other problem they have is a lack of an NCO corps. In Saddam’s army, they didn’t exist, and the officers at the next level up were often Baathist political hacks. So while the individual Iraqi soldiers have improved dramatically, the Iraqi military still has some serious gaps in its table of organization that prevents it from being completely effective. These are the things the U.S. is working to improve now.
I’ve heard about these troops. Cheney visited them not long ago.While Cheney was surrounded by U.S. forces guarding him with guns at the ready, the Iraqi soldiers had no weapons but held their arms out like they were carrying imaginary guns.
The guns were a matching set with the WMDs.
Dr. Rice just isn’t good with numbers. I remember in 2004, when the administration kept repeating that we’d “killed or captured 75% of the Al Qaida leadership”. Wolf Blitzer, interviewing Rice, asked if that was correct; she said it was. He then asked the logical question: “How many, exactly? 75% of what number?” Rice actually replied “I would think it would be in the tens to hundreds.”
I used to have a chess set like that. White had a full complement of pieces, while black was missing one knight, both rooks, a bishop, and three pawns. It was great–I could beat anybody in ten moves.
If I played white. 
Stranger
I mean, I’m sure you have a cite for it and all, but if it comes from the same people who’ve been selling us fairytales all along about how much progress is being made over there, then you can’t expect anyone whose natural skepticism is still operating to buy into such a cite.
Now this I fully believe. I know that many of the “Iraqi Army” units are really Shi’ite militia or peshmerga, so if those units are controlling areas solidly in Shi’ite or Kurdish parts of Iraq, I’m not sure that means a hell of a lot.
Thing is, anyone willing to sign up seriously with a puppet govenment is likely to be either a thug loyal only to himself, or a factionalist who just wants access to training and weapons for the upcoming civil war. At least the ones who take the money and run aren’t going to be killing innocent people, or robbing them at gunpoint. A real Iraqi patriot would avoid a puppet military like the plague, I’d think.
These numbers do not include the Peshmerga, as far as I know. In any event, there has been real progress, and it’s not just in controlling relatively peaceful Kurdish areas. For example, the Iraqi military is now controlling Fallujah, Ramallah, and Samarrah.
Just a few months ago, when insurgents would strike an Iraqi unit or attack a police station, the police or military would generally break and run. Ind a few cases, entire Iraqi units simply laid down their arms and faded back into the population. This does not happen any more. There have been some ferocious firefights between the Iraqi military and the insurgency, and the Iraqi military has not broken ranks and fled in a long time. Not a single police station has been abandoned to insurgents in months, so far as I know.
There are 227,000 Iraqi Security Forces. That includes troops AND police officers. The Iraqi army currently has 102 battalions, equally roughly 100,000 men. About 40% of those are now considered effective enough to operate independently of the U.S. military, and the other 60% are now considered good enough to operate side by site with either U.S. forces or other, better equipped and trained Iraqi units.
Look, this is not an all-sunshine-and-roses situation. 40 battalions is not nearly enough. In fact, even if the entire 102 battalions in the Iraqi army was fully capable, it would not be enough. I believe there is still a shortfall of something like 150,000 men over what the U.S. says the Iraqi military needs. The military is still far too factional, and much to ready to protect various regional interests rather than the country at large. It’s still unclear how much of the military is infested with people who have their own agendas.
But it’s foolish to just put your hands over your ears and go, “lalalala” at any news of progress. No doubt some of it is bullshit, and at this point I don’t trust a word that comes out of the white house or the mouth of Donald Rumsfeld. But there are plenty of independent evaluations out there - some by Democrats like Joe Biden. There HAS been a dramatic shift in the last few months. As Biden has said, the White House screwed up and basically wasted a year and a half by not taking military reconstruction seriously, but General Petraeus has really overhauled things and the Iraqi military has been improving dramatically in the last few months.
?? Did I just get whooshed? Where in Iraq is the Iraqi “Ramallah”? The only Ramallah I’ve ever heard of is the Palestinian Authority HQ in the West Bank. Do you perhaps mean Ramadi?
Look, it hasn’t been that long since the Iraqi army was judged to have one reliable battalion. One. ~1000 men.
So when an Administration figure says there are 227,000 quality security forces in Iraq, doesn’t that just make you think, “how did they train and battle-harden so many, so fast? Who trained them, how much American/Coalition manpower was involved, and how much time was spent training them?” Doesn’t that just sound like it’s freakin’ impossible, even if we were talking about a much more stable environment for this to happen in?
And if a majority of the 227K are local police and whatnot, how the fuck does Condi know how ‘quality’ they are?? Who’s gone around and evaluated these guys, to see whose side they’re really on, and how they’d hold up in a ‘security’ situation, i.e. dealing with the operations of a hostile insurgency in their area? I mean, if local policing of run-of-the-mill crime is all they can do, they’re not ‘security’ forces, by any reasonable definition.
I’m open to the possibility of good news from Iraq. But there’s ‘good’, and there’s ‘too good to be true.’ And I’m telling you right now, Sam, this is so far into the latter category that you’re spilling your cred on the sidewalk here by buying into it.
The point is, it’s generally conceded that you can’t know - that peshmerga and Badr Corps and so forth are, in many cases, wearing Iraqi uniforms.
Last I checked, nobody was controlling Samarra. And I’m willing to bet that if they’re nominally controlling Fallujah, they’re doing it with a lot of American help - and I mean available firepower on the scene, not just logistics.
Yeah. Joe Biden.
Petraeus is top-rate, but there’s a limit to how much even he can do to improve Iraq’s security forces in a matter of months.
If you can find a number of “quality security forces” that Petraeus is willing to stand behind, I’ll believe it because I believe he’s honest, and he knows what’s real, and what his limitations are. But I’ll also bet it won’t be a number beginning with ‘2’.
The Houston Chronicle disagrees with respect to Samarra:
Sides blur for U.S. troops trying to secure Samarra
To sum up: nobody controls Samarra, U.S. troops are fighting there, and they figure that when they pull out, the insurgents, not the Iraqi Army, will take control.
Some bits and pieces from Fallujah:
Car bomb hits US military patrol in Iraq’s Fallujah (Feb. 14)
Iraq: head of Fallujah city council killed by masked gunmen (Feb. 7)
So: plenty of U.S. troop activity near Fallujah, and ‘control’ is an iffy thing there at best.
Ramallah? That’s West Bank; I’m thinking you meant Ramadi, possibly?
At any rate, U.S. troops are active in all of these places, and Iraqi forces seem to be a nonfactor in Samarra. Nobody controls Samarra, and US troops and local Iraqi officials are still getting killed in Fallujah and Ramadi, with little sense from the news reports of Iraqi troops’ being in charge.
I won’t accuse you of putting your hands over your ears and going ‘lalalala’ about bad news from Iraq; I believe you’re fundamentally honest. But news accounts don’t seem to support your statements about the ‘good news’ in Iraq.