U.S. authorities spent millions of dollars...

[NNN0LHI]

...and many man hours setting up, training and supplying Mosul's 4,000-strong police force over the past year, only to have 80 percent of it desert the moment insurgents threatened. snip

A multi-million-dollar police academy full of computers, weapons, first aid equipment and other supplies was attacked and looted during the rampage and is now smashed up and deserted.

A few days before it was attacked, several of the U.S. military's top generals in Iraq had visited the centre to praise the effectiveness of the recruiting and training. snip

Many Iraqi police dropped their weapons and ran when hundreds of insurgents stormed Mosul police stations and then looted, burned or blew them up in a two-day rampage on Nov. 10-11.

more

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/MAR246598.htm

[Inland]

1. Desert? Or join another side? Just what are we training?

I wonder if there aren't defections on a platoon or company level. You could have a non-com or officer level person take an entire group with him. We don't know the loyalities. I have read accounts of how they are orgainizing militia and Iraqi national guard along ethnic/tribal lines.

We could be training a competent, brave force---just not one that fights for the named Iraqi government.

[natrat]

2. murikan military knowhow at work

[gratuitous]

3. Can't imagine why they'd do that

I mean, if some foreign invader captured Stupidhead, occupied the White House, suspended the constitution, installed a puppet dictatorship to rule the United States, and called all the shots in my country from its foreign capitol while reducing me and my neighbors to starving-in-the-streets penury, I can't imagine why me and my friends wouldn't join up with their quisling security forces, get armed and trained, so I could round up my fellow citizens for imprisonment, torture and sanctioned murder, as well as the chance to fire on unarmed women and children.

I just don't understand some people's actions in Iraq. Don't they know that Bush has a man date?