It was bitter and mirthless, but a laugh, nonetheless, to read this:
This week Gen. John Abizaid, who commands U.S. Central Command and is in overall charge of the war in Iraq, went before the Senate Armed Services Committee and said he thinks we turned a corner with the success of the Jan. 30 Iraqi national elections.
Abizaid, a Middle East specialist who speaks Arabic, is arguably the smartest person wearing four stars in the Army. He thinks the Iraqi insurgency is now on the wane, the wind taken out of the bad guys' sail by the millions of Iraqis who ignored the death threats and flocked to the polls to vote on their own future.
His remarks to the senators came just one day after the biggest and deadliest car bombing in the two years of war and insurgency in Iraq - a monster blast that killed 125 people in the south-central town of Hillah. Most of the victims were recruits for the Iraq military and security forces who were lined up at a clinic to take their physical exams.
Yep, sounds like an insurgency on the wane to me. And those recruits? Not to worry:
Abizaid says he and other American commanders on the ground believe that by year's end there will be enough trained and equipped Iraqi security forces to take over the active side of the war against the insurgents.
He acknowledged that there are varying estimates of the effectiveness and strength and capabilities of the newly trained Iraqi forces, but said they are growing and getting better at the business of securing their own country.
Abizaid says he likens the process of creating an Iraqi army to how the American colonists built their army from the ground up during the Revolutionary War. "That's a good sort of model to keep in mind when we talk about Iraqi security forces," Abizaid told the Senate committee.
Uh-huh. You know those "varying estimates of the effectiveness and strength and capabilities of the newly trained Iraqi forces"? They're "varying," all right:
Training of Iraq's security forces, crucial to any exit strategy for Britain and the US, is going so badly that the Pentagon has stopped giving figures for the number of combat-ready indigenous troops, The Independent on Sunday has learned.
Instead, only figures for troops "on hand" are issued. The small number of soldiers, national guardsmen and police capable of operating against the country's bloody insurgency is concealed in an overall total of Iraqis in uniform, which includes raw recruits and police who have gone on duty after as little as three weeks' training. In some cases they have no weapons, body armour or even documents to show they are in the police.
The resulting confusion over numbers has allowed the US administration to claim that it is half-way to meeting the target of training almost 270,000 Iraqi forces, including around 52,000 troops and 135,000 Iraqi policemen. The reality, according to experts, is that there may be as few as 5,000 troops who could be considered combat ready.
Everything's coming up roses. Just ask the Ministry of Truth.
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