Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
We've been there for how many months, and there is one battalion of 800 Iraqis (read: Kurds) capable of fighting on their own. At that rate, success it right around the corner.
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A deliberately calculated mis-statement of the truth, and I suspect you know why. (That was as politely as I could say that. Sorry.)
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"AT HIS PRESS CONFERENCE ON October 4, President Bush took a question about the number of Iraqi military units engaged in fighting insurgents and terrorists. Bush, the reporter noted, had once said there were 100 Iraqi battalions in combat "across the nation." But in an appearance on Capitol Hill, two U.S. Army generals had recently said "there's only one battle-ready battalion" of Iraqi soldiers, according to the reporter. "Something is not adding up here."
Bush offered only a little help in reconciling the numbers. "Right now there are over 80 [Iraqi] battalions fighting alongside coalition troops," he said. "There are over 30 Iraqi battalions in the lead. And that is substantial progress from the way the world was a year ago." But what about the single "battle-ready" unit of Iraqi troops? Bush didn't say.
The result was confusion, as with so much else about Iraq when viewed from Washington. This is not solely the fault of a press corps unsympathetic to the Bush administration and the war in Iraq. The president and the generals had tried to say the same thing about Iraqi troops, but ended up sounding like they were contradicting each other. Reporters, most of them anyway, didn't go to the trouble of straightening out the numbers.
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But what about that single "battle-ready" battalion of Iraqis? Bush didn't broach the subject, but the man in charge of training Iraqi soldiers, Gen. David Petraeus, did. Speaking at the Pentagon the day before Bush's speech, Petraeus cleared up the troop numbers, but only after weeks of confusion. He got minimal media coverage. "There are now over 197,000 trained and equipped Iraqi security forces," he said. And "there are over 115 police and army combat battalions in the fight."
The mixup came over the four categories that measure the level of independence of Iraqi forces. About 80 battalions "are assessed as fighting alongside our forces," Petraeus said. Bush got that right. They belong to category three. Only one battalion needs "no coalition assistance whatsoever--i.e., fully independent." That's category one. A "substantial number" of another 35 "have their own areas of operation," but fight with American soldiers embedded in their units. These "allow coalition units to focus elsewhere or eventually to go home." They comprise category two. So Iraqi battalions rated one, two, and three add up to roughly 115 "battle-ready" units--not one. Category four troops aren't ready for combat."
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(ETA) - Sorry, forgot to make my point.
You made that statement with the intention of communicating how little progress we've made - how we've come up with ONE Iraqi battalion in all this time, when (as I'm sure you're aware) we have made up almost a complete army, most of which is getting close to that truly independant stage. You tried to communicate a false paradigm by using just-the-right misleading words.
Can I assume that the strength of your positions and logic is such that truth doesn't help you advance them?
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