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[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Spencer Ackerman gives Bush's claim the Full Monty:

• It was hard to watch last night's debate and not conclude that John Kerry won. But listening to President Bush talk about Iraq, it was clear that all Kerry really had to do was show up. Amid a rising tide of violence and with a constricting area of the country under the control of the weak Iraqi interim government, Bush repeatedly emphasized, "I have a plan." (Presumably, this is the plan that he promised in the spring he would detail in a series of televised speeches that he never delivered.) But the only time Bush ever specified what that strategy is--namely, training Iraqi security forces--he badly misrepresented the situation on the ground.
  
  "The best way for Iraq to be safe and secure is for Iraqi citizens to be trained to do the job," Bush said. "We've got 100,000 trained now, 125,000 by the end of this year, 200,000 by the end of next year." These numbers are simply inaccurate. For much of this year, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld totaled the figure of trained Iraqi police, soldiers, and national guardsmen at 200,000--despite the April collapse of those forces during the Sunni and Sadrist insurgencies--only to scale the number back to about 90,000 last month. The 100,000-force figure Bush repeatedly quoted last night has been the one his administration has stuck with.
  
  But that figure isn't even close to the truth. According to internal Pentagon documents recently obtained by Reuters, only 22,700 Iraqi forces have received enough training to be considered even "minimally effective." Barely 8,000 of the 90,000-strong police force have completed a full eight weeks of training--after a year and a half of occupation. While Lieutenant General David Petraeus wrote in a Washington Post op-ed on Sunday that the Iraqi civil-intervention force is "now conducting operations," the leaked Pentagon documents show that training hasn't even begun for its 4,800 members. And perhaps most significantly, while Bush promised 200,000 Iraqis would be trained by the end of the next year, the documents state that it will take until July 2006 to train 135,000 Iraqi police officers.
  
  But the flimsy numbers on Iraqi security forces don't fully capture the dire condition of the administration's so-called Iraqification approach. Iraqi security-force recruits don't appear to be enlisting primarily out of a desire to defend the interim Iraqi government; they're joining up because of widespread unemployment. When they get in uniform, they often collude with the insurgency. In the relatively quiet southern city of Basra, British occupation soldiers have reported taking fire from Iraqi police, and U.S. intelligence believes many policemen are truly loyal not to Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, but to Moqtada Al Sadr. What's more, the presence of U.S. forces attacking insurgent-controlled cities has been eroding Iraqi security forces' willingness to fight for Allawi. According to the Iraqi newspaper Addustour, American bombardment of Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit has led Iraqi national guardsmen to resign in protest. With Iraqi Defense Minister Hazim Al Shalaan promising to retake insurgent cities this month--and, as the debate ended, news broke of U.S. forces fighting their way to the center of Samarra--this dynamic may further expose the picture painted by the president last night as fundamentally divorced from reality.
  
  At one point in the debate, moderator Jim Lehrer asked Kerry to substantiate his charge that President Bush has "essentially [been] lying to the American people about Iraq." Before laying out his case, Kerry cautioned, "I've never, ever used the harshest word, as you did just then." But listening to the sham numbers at the center of Bush's argument supposedly showing that his Iraq strategy is succeeding, Kerry would have been well within his rights to say bluntly that Bush is lying.

Seems to me that getting this stuff right is a lot more important than which subway was closed for which convention.

Capsule? This is too long. Just gimme something you'd spit at the judge.