The ONE thing that sticks out in my mind about training an Iraqi army

[Horse with no Name]

It's been FOUR years and there STILL isn't a cogent Iraqi Army trained.
In FOUR years a sizable number of our soldiers have been to boot camp and have probably served a couple of tours in Iraq, YET the same people training Americans cannot train Iraqis?
I just cannot understand this.
If they needed to take them out of the country to train them, then so be it. But after such a lengthy time and even lengthier excuses...one MIGHT get the idea that training an Iraqi Army has never really been our objective...

[babylonsister]

1. Biggest puzzle: the Iraqi Army that might have been trained might also

be fighting against the troops' best interests, i.e., their intent might be to blow up Americans. How the hell do you fight that?

[EFerrari]

5. "Training" the Iraqi Army is like HAVA or NCLB.

One more Orwellian name for a BFEE cash cow.

[Horse with no Name]

6. Excellent point

and is presently a moot point. The window of opportunity has long since passed to build an Iraqi fighting force.
That opportunity went out the window when we started handing out no-bid contracts to Halliburton to rebuild a country that was quite capable of rebuilding itself.
It is worth noting (and speaking to the choir here)that so much of this could have been avoided.
I guess the point is...did they WANT to avoid this?

[babylonsister]

8. Do/did they have a choice? nt

[Horse with no Name]

10. There was always a choice

they just chose the wrong one.

[babylonsister]

13. We don't know that, or know what's really going on over in Iraq.

Who's wrong, them or us? I can't condemn the Iraqis for fighting for their country, even if it's against the 'occupiers', which would be us.

[Horse with no Name]

15. I don't blame them a bit

I watched a great documentary a couple of years ago interviewing men who were willing to join with the US forces against the "insurgency".
By trade I believe he was a contractor, and he said that the US was giving all the rebuilding work to their croneys so his workers initially, in order to feed their families, contracted their services with the insurgency because there were no other paying jobs.
We are the occupiers, no doubt. They have every right to fight us. If they don't, they will FOREVER lose their natural resources to occupying forces and their croneys. IF that happens, that country will never stand a chance at being rebuilt. It will lay in ruins like NOLA.

[EFerrari]

17. NOLA should adopt Baghdad as a sister city.

:(

[EFerrari]

2. Exactly. "Oh, those lazy Iraquis can't get their act together."

While Blackwater and Halliburton and who knows who continues to rake it in. And who knows what other machinations the BFEE is engaged in -- I mean besides torture and stuff. :mad:

[Breeze54]

3. According to recent reports there are 114000 trained Iraqi Troops ready to go...

So? What's the hold up? Maybe like babylonsister said?
They aren't all pledging allegience and have turned their guns on US soldiers.

It's a really fucked up fiasco, civil war. But you already know that.

[magellan]

4. I think some of them WERE trained out of country

I'm sure I saw a story or two about Iraqi army guys being trained up here in the US to go back and train other troops.

If only they hadn't disbanded the Iraqi army after the invasion. Not including the invasion, that was one of their biggest early mistakes.

[EFerrari]

7. Can I ask a stupid question? Why does the Iraqi army need US

to train them?

Weren't they a formidable foe in the first Gulf War? That's what Poppy's press corpse told us.

:shrug:

[Horse with no Name]

9. It could have something to do with the debathification

would be my guess.

[EFerrari]

11. So, we're supposed to believe that all those guys who were

by necessity Ba'athists are no longer Ba'athists AND now they need to be trained?

What did we do, demagnetize their brains? lol :hi:

Edit: as soon as you start really thinking about this bs, it can't make sense.

[Horse with no Name]

12. It's Orwellian

as you have pointed out.;)

[EFerrari]

14. You've nailed something very important, imho.

By pinning this on "training" the Iraqi army, BushCo can be totally off the hook.

If we're losing the war, it's obviously the Iraqis fault!

lol

[Horse with no Name]

16. Yes. The question really is

Was it by accident or by design?

[EFerrari]

18. Judging by our new embassy, by design.

Because that complex couldn't have been completed two years ago.

[Horse with no Name]

19. Exactly.

AND not to mention that we will need troops stationed there to protect Exxon's interests.

[aquart]

26. Oh, Georgie never intended to leave. Ever.

Remember how his people told the NYT Magazine that this is the era of the American EMPIRE? (In the same article as "reality-based," I think.) See, we were supposed to kill Saddam, accept the thanks of a grateful Iraq, set up a puppet government (banana republic minus bananas), and then move on to civilizing Iran, Syria, and anyone else in the way of gaining possession of all the Caspian Basin oil.

Only a total racist could even think of this, let alone set out to do it. It ignores the Russians, Chinese, Indians, and Europeans who are closer to the Caspian Basin than we are. And who might feel we were encroaching. And it dismisses the Arabs, Persians, and other groups who have maintained their hold on the area for centuries with unhesitating brutality.

Georgie slept thru history classes, and I'm damned sure he never watched Shakespeare's Julius Caesar or Graves' I, Claudius, or he would have noticed what happens when you make a republic into an empire. And he sure wouldn't have been stupid enough to cut military benefits. Oh, wait.

[EFerrari]

28. The really surprising thing isn't Iraq but how long we've managed

to survive doing the same failing thing for all these years. Hawaii was probably the last time this sh!t worked.

[aquart]

31. Hawaii was unarmed.

Hawaii is the place where every child is welcomed into every person's home, where the village really does raise him. Hawaii is not a place known for refining torture to high art or for the cruelty of its revenges. The Middle East is.

[EFerrari]

32. Well, someone might have pointed out to Junior that

Baghdad isn't Honolulu.

[aquart]

23. EXACTLY!

Wish I'd read you before I posted.

[EFerrari]

24. What WAS "Desert Storm" all about if these guys can't march

in formation?

Was BushCo lying then or are they lying now? :shrug:

edit: They could have been lying both times, I know. lol

[aquart]

27. Always assume they're lying. You really can't go wrong that way.

[EFerrari]

29. True. Saddam asks permission to go into Kuwait, he gets it

and he gets jumped. And we get a glorious made for cable war.

Later, after we bomb and starve his people for over a decade, we ask him to prove a negative.

It doesn't pay to work for the U.S. government any more.

[kenny blankenship]

20. They can't deploy them against other Iraqis because

everybody has a side, by the virtue of their religious affiliation. Probably half (plucking numbers) of the Iraqi Army and police forces are already secretly aligned with one faction or another. That is to say, in the parlance of the Vietnam era, that the forces we are training are heavily infiltrated by the very 'enemy' we're fighting.. After all how the hell would you know, unless you were Iraqi yourself, who is who and what their true loyalties are? And how much loyalty can there be to the central government when the factions that make up that government are at each other's throats and plainly do not trust each other. We can't even communicate with the Iraqi Army without Iraqi interpreters. When Iraqi units have been deployed against Iraqi militant groups in the past, very frequently they've tipped off the targeted militias (as also civilian government officials have done), and sometimes they've refused to fight. They have even on a few occasions joined the militias in shooting at our troops. Entire units have been disbanded and sent home because they've been found out to be sectarian militia infiltrators. Basically, the US commanders have to look at the Iraqi Army which we've been training as the submerged aspect of the different insurgent factions attempting to gain weaponry and training in order to carry out the struggle against each other after we leave. The Iraqi Army could be very well trained--the best ever--but even so you don't dare use it, for fear that might fail to perform in a crucial battlefield situation embarrassing or endangering our war effort, or for fear that it might turn on your troops, or that it might turn on itself and initiate a full scale civil war. It's for these reasons that the I.A. receives training but no heavy weaponry.

That is why over four years later there is no effective Iraqi Army and why the US forces must do the actual fighting.

[EFerrari]

25. So the issue isn't training at all. And all this ranting about

the Iraqis "standing up" is bullshit. We are the reason they don't "stand up" because if they "stand up" it may not be in the US interest.

[EFerrari]

21. The more I think about this, the more i think it should be sent

to Amy Goodman's producers.

It's clearly bs and yet, our CONGRESS keeps talking as if it's real as does the whore media.

[aquart]

22. The idea that we had to "train" Iraqis is the first idiocy.

They weren't living in caves and they had an army. They fought wars. They didn't need us to come in and teach them what they already knew. Such condescending racist arrogance.

[leftofthedial]

30. the fascists have no desire whatsoever to end the chaos in Iraq

*that* was the mission they accomplished--create chaos

now the mission is to perpetuate the chaos

[EFerrari]

33. I've always thought they are firestarters. n/t