Training, we need no stinking training

McClatchy reporters are continuing their great tradition from the Knight Ridder days of actually getting some pretty interesting nuggets of information as to what is going on in Iraq. The US is in a strategic morass as the training and leaving strategy is out the window and the security strategy is a farce.

" Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces.

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...

Casey's "mandate was transition. General Petraeus' mandate is security. It is a change based on conditions. Certain conditions have to be met for the transition to be successful. Security is part of that. And General Petraeus recognizes that," said Brig. Gen. Dana Pittard, commander of the Iraq Assistance Group in charge of supporting trained Iraqi forces.

I have not had my coffee this morning, but we have seen at least the following exit strategies: Unicorns appearing out of our ass from pre-war to June of 2003, large scale search and destroy missions to defeat the insurgency and alienate the population from May 2003 to mid 2005 until the evidence that reducing Fallujah to rubble did not make that city secure. In between there was the short run buzz to re-boot Saddam Hussein's regime with a friendly, pro-west, secular autocrat exile until Sistani put his foot down. Then there was the creation of a Madisonian democracy with no pre-existing cross-interest institutions of trust in three elections or less. Concurrent with that was the "They stand up, we stand down" plan with a minor twist of McMaster's couter-insurgency in Tal Afar. Now we have the Petreus counter-insurgency doctrine with far too few forces and not enough trusted local allies, and that is failing too.

I am probably missing one or two things but some of these strategies are mutually contradictory, and if this is the short count without coffee, strategic confusion is evident.