Wait a minute. I distinctly remember the President giving a speech on a carrier with a banner proclaiming “mission accomplish”. Are you telling me we’re still fighting that same war?
No way, dude. We’ve ended “major combat operations” in Iraq. This is all just a bit of tidying up. Like the Marshall Plan, only with billions of dollars of cash being anonymously dumped out of the back of trucks. Don’t you remember when Bush landed on an aircraft like some cheesy hero out of a bad Clive Cussler novel[sup]*[/sup] and announced this? Jeesh.
So how come we can take a raw recruit, give him or her nine weeks of basic training, add on whatever AIT they need for their specialty, and they’re ready to go? We’ve been training the Iraquis for what, five years now? Sound like slow learners to me. Those guys couldn’t organize a fart at a bean eating contest.
Yes, won’t the troops be surprised when they find themselves boiling in a solution of ethanolic sodium borohydride.
But then, someone has to pay to keep the generals honest, and they did all volunteer for the mission.
You can build an E-1 that way, sure. But it takes a few more years to build his squad leader, a few more years on top of that to build his sarge.
Building an entire NCO corps, commissioned officer corps, various military academies and schools to train them, logistics chains to feed them, a banking structure to pay them - you think our own Army built these things in five fucking years?
Not sure how you gathered that from what he said. What does our troop level have to do with whether or not the war ends? He could have told us “I have been ordered to start moving every single one of our guys out by the end of 2007, no exceptions” and that still wouldn’t be him saying the war is within measurable distance of the end. You confuse U.S. involvement in the war with the war itself. The war won’t end just because we aren’t there–of course, even the quote you have here doesn’t suggest we won’t be there, just that we may reduce troop levels, so far from saying the war is nearing an end I’m not sure how you even made that association to be honest.
I see no contradiction in the two articles at all. The first article you linked said that we may be able to reduce troop levels next year if the Iraqi forces continue developing in an acceptable manner. Your second article quotes Dempsey saying that he believes we should expect a reduction in U.S. troop level and focus on building the Iraqi Army for when that day comes. Not only do they not contradict one another, they almost say the exact same thing, the only real difference is Dempsey also included some comments about the problems the Iraqi forces have faced; note that his overarching analysis was:
Obviously you’re not familiar with Orwell’s writings, or you’d be able to recognize where that comes from.
“At some point” means when, exactly? “At some point” could be tomorrow, or it could be 200 years from now, whereas Odierno is talking about “next spring.” Unless you’re playing Abbott and Costello, then “next spring” is a pretty definite time frame. Also, given that Dempsey says that the next group of Iraqi units will have fewer personnel and that they will be even more poorly trained than the current crop of Iraqi units, I don’t see how we can think that handing Iraq over to local forces can be “just around the corner.”
A couple months ago stories came out that we would no longer concentrate on training Iraqis .
Last week I read a story on the US killing a guy setting up an IED. He was a Lieutenant in the Iraqi army and we trained him.
It is a mess. But we have a huge embassy to poice and maintain.