Friday, April 20, 2007

Training Iraqi troops no longer driving force in U.S. policy

According to the McClatchy News Service the goal of the American troops is no longer to train the Iraqi forces but to defeat the insurgents and gain control of the troubled areas within Iraq.
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.
This would mean that our current strategy of training the Iraqi forces is not working and that Pentagon officials are well aware of this. They will not come out and declare this publicly because they realize if they do Americans, even those that currently support the war, will realize that this situation is no closer to its conclusion than it was when the war first started. How are only 140,000 troops expected to quell an insurgency with a seemingly endless supply of new recruits? The only logical conclusion to make is that the Bush administration realizes all too well that this war is lost but will keep trying new tactics until President Bush leaves office. They are committing more of our troops to death and injury based on a bad policy. As Senator Kerry said so eloquently "Who wants to be the last to die for a mistake". It seems President Bush simply doesn't care who dies as long as he can remain in his delusional state this war was the right choice. It is time for all Americans to realize that this war is lost and no amount of money or death is going to change that.

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