[Marxism] US giving up on Iraqi troops, say US forces must defeat rebels, hold provinces

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

With the Shia government they helped create as scapegoat for their failures,
as always.
Anyway, this means that more escalation is coming.  Some estimates are that
there are now 360,000 US forces (including private ones) in Iraq.
Fred Feldman 

TRAINING IRAQI TROOPS NO LONGER DRIVING FORCE IN U.S. POLICY
By Nancy A. Youssef
McClatchy Newspapers

April 19, 2007
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/17104704.htm
WASHINGTON -- 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.

Casey's "mandate was transition.  General Petraeus' mandate is security. 
It is a change based on conditions.  Certain conditions have to be met for
the transition to be successful.  Security is part of that.  And General
Petraeus recognizes that," said Brig. Gen. Dana Pittard, commander of the
Iraq Assistance Group in charge of supporting trained Iraqi forces.

"I think it is too much to expect that we were going to start from scratch .
. . in an environment that featured a rising sectarian struggle and lack of
progress with the government," said a senior Pentagon official.  "The
conditions had sufficiently changed that the Abizaid/Casey approach alone
wasn't going to be sufficient."

Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who's in charge of training Iraqi troops, said in
February that he hoped that Iraqi troops would be able to lead by December.
"At the tactical level, I do believe by the end of the year, the conditions
should be set that they are increasingly taking responsibility for the
combat operations," Dempsey told NBC News.

Maj. Gen. Doug Lute, the director of operations at U.S. Central Command,
which oversees military activities in the Middle East, said that during the
troop increase, U.S. officers will be trying to determine how ready Iraqi
forces are to assume control.

"We are looking for indicators where we can assess the extent to which we
are fighting alongside Iraqi security forces, not as a replacement to them,"
he said.  Those signs will include "things like the number of U.S.-only
missions, the number of combined U.S.-Iraqi missions, the number where
Iraqis are in the lead, the number of Joint Security Stations set up," he
said.

That's a far cry from the optimistic assessments U.S. commanders offered
throughout 2006 about the impact of training Iraqis. 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.

But U.S. forces complained that the Iraqi forces weren't getting the support
from their government and that Iraqi military commanders, many who worked
under Saddam Hussein, weren't as willing to embrace their tactics. 

Among everyday Iraqis, some said they didn't trust their forces, saying they
were sectarian and easily susceptible to corruption. Most important,
insurgents and militiamen had infiltrated the forces, using their power to
carry out sectarian attacks.

In nearly every area where Iraqi forces were given control, the security
situation rapidly deteriorated.  The exceptions were areas dominated largely
by one sect and policed by members of that sect.

In the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar, which Bush celebrated last year as
an example of success, suspected Sunni Muslim insurgents set off a bomb last
month that killed as many as 150 people, the largest single bombing attack
of the war.  Shiite Muslim mobs, including some police officers, pulled
Sunnis from their homes and executed dozens afterward.  U.S. troops were
dispatched to restore order.

Earlier this month, U.S. forces engaged in heavy fighting in the southern
city of Diwaniyah after Iraqi forces, who'd been given control of the region
in January 2006, lost control of the city.

U.S. officials said they once believed that if they empowered their Iraqi
counterparts, they'd take the lead and do a better job of curtailing the
violence.  But they concede that's no longer their operating principle.
Pentagon officials won't say how many U.S. troops are engaged in training,
though they said that the number of teams assigned to work alongside trained
Iraqi troops hasn't changed. 

Military officials say there's no doubt that the November U.S. elections,
which gave Democrats control of both houses of Congress, helped push
training down the priority list. The elections, they said, made it clear
that voters didn't have the patience to wait for Iraqis to take the lead. 

"To the extent we are losing the American public, we were losing" in the
transition approach, said a senior military commander in Washington.
Military analysts cite a number of reasons that the training program didn't
work.

"The goal was to put the Iraqis in charge. The problem is we didn't know how
to do it and we underestimated the insurgency," said Anthony Cordesman, of
the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Said Paul Hughes of the U.S. Institute for Peace:  "In our initial efforts
to hand security missions over to Iraqi forces, we took the training wheels
off too early -- and the bike fell over."

Military officials now measure success by whether the troops are curbing
violence, not by the number of Iraqi troops trained. 

Many officials are vague about when the U.S. will know when troops can begin
to return home. Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said
the U.S. is trying to buy "time for the Iraqi government to provide the good
governance and the economic activity that's required."

One State Department official, who also asked not to be named because of the
sensitivity of the subject, expressed the same sentiment in blunter terms.
"Our strategy now is to basically hold on and wait for the Iraqis to do
something," he said.

 

 




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