About those Iraqi troops:
“The U.S. military’s effort to train Iraqi forces has been rife with problems, from officers being sent in with poor preparation to a lack of basic necessities such as interpreters and office materials, according to internal Army documents.
The shortcomings have plagued a program that is central to the U.S. strategy in Iraq and is growing in importance. A Pentagon effort to rethink policies in Iraq is likely to suggest placing less emphasis on combat and more on training and advising, sources say.
In dozens of official interviews compiled by the Army for its oral history archives, officers who had been involved in training and advising Iraqis bluntly criticized almost every aspect of the effort. Some officers thought that team members were often selected poorly. Others fretted that the soldiers who prepared them had never served in Iraq and lacked understanding of the tasks of training and advising. Many said they felt insufficiently supported by the Army while in Iraq, with intermittent shipments of supplies and interpreters who often did not seem to understand English.
In case you think they’re kidding:
Some of the American officers even faulted their own lack of understanding of the task. “If I had to do it again, I know I’d do it completely different,” reported Maj. Mike Sullivan, who advised an Iraqi army battalion in 2004. “I went there with the wrong attitude and I thought I understood Iraq and the history because I had seen PowerPoint slides, but I really didn’t.”
To me Maj. Mike Sullivan’s brief paragraph encapsulates almost everything that America did wrong in Iraq. The hubris (powerpoint?), the world-class fighting force asked to do jobs they weren’t trained to do, the lack of resources to do the job right, the cultural and language barriers, the glaring disconnect between political rhetoric and on-the-ground reality, it’s all in there. More:
[Lt. Col. Kevin] Farrell, the officer in east Baghdad, said some advisers were literally “phoning in” their work. Some would not leave the forward operating base “more than one or two days out of the week — instead they would just call the Iraqis on cellphones,” he said.
If you care about Iraq and hope that America can eventually leave behind a stable, democratic state then a story like this is a punch in the gut.