As they stand up, we’ll stand down run for cover:
U.S. officials have long claimed that as America trains more Iraqi forces the violence in the country will subside. Actually, the exact opposite has happened, veteran Iraq correspondent Tom Lasseter (formerly with Knight Ridder, now with McClatchy after the sale) calculates today.
“Despite the addition of almost 100,000 U.S.-trained Iraqi troops in the past year, American efforts to pacify central Iraq and the capital appear to be failing, challenging a central assumption behind the U.S. strategy in Iraq: that training more Iraqi security forces will allow American troops to start going home,” he observes.
Of course, one problem has been that some of these newly-trained forces are joining in the sectarian carnage. Uniformed officers or official police vehicles are often spotted the scene of killings.
The raw numbers: the number of trained Iraqi soldiers and police grew from an estimated 168,670 in June 2005 to some 264,600 this June. “Yet Baghdad’s morgue is receiving nearly twice as many dead Iraqis each day as it did last year,” Lasseter notes. “The number of bombings causing multiple fatalities has risen steadily. Attacks on American and Iraqi troops last month grew 44 percent from June 2005.”
Maybe it’s time to head back to the drawing board again.
Funny how history repeats itself. I predict that just as in Afghanistan, we will sooner or later be fighting some (many?) of the same people we are currently training in Iraq.