GADFLY: Standing Up? Standing Down?

Does this sound familiar: “As Iraqi troops stand up, U.S.
troops will stand down.?” It’s what we’ve been told for some time will be the
“metric” of

when American troops can withdraw from Iraq.  The real question is, does the
administration really intend to effectuate this policy, and even if it does, is
it even possible, and new information seems to indicate that the answer to both
questions seems to be no. 

The fact is, the Iraqi troops aren’t “standing up,” and the
best proof of that is that the Pentagon, which was fond of floating figures on
how many Iraqi troops were trained, has suddenly decided it won’t reveal that
number anymore. You’d think that, if for no other reasons than political ones,
the administration and its minions would want to keep feeding us the good news
about how much progress is being made in Iraq (something they

complain bitterly is under-reported by the traditional media). 

So what’s their reason for not reporting the number of
trained Iraqis anymore? Why, according to the Pentagon, it’s because

the number is CLASSIFIED.

Which,
of course, begs the question, if that number is classified, why was the Pentagon
regularly issuing

reports stating the number of trained Iraqis? Was someone violating the law
by revealing classified information when these reports were released, or were
they the result of

on-the-fly declassification?

And why is it
the administration, has routinely sent out its flacks to tout the number of
trained Iraqis, as recently as

GOP head Ken Mehlman’s remarkable appearance on the Daily Show if the
number is classified?  The answer is obvious: the Iraqis aren’t being trained in
anything either like the numbers we’ve been told or, even worse, in the numbers
it’s going to take for them to take over the laboring oar of providing security
in Iraq, and the more apparent that becomes, the more the “we’ll stand down when
they stand up” is revealed as the sham it really is, and the more “classified”
that failure becomes. 

The administration and, more importantly, its commanders on
the ground, know the Iraqi army and police will likely never be capable, on
their own, of restoring security in a country made insecure by our invasion and
occupation. In

his testimony before Congress, General Casey, our commander in Iraq, had to
admit how few Iraqi battalions were battle ready, a scenario which has

gotten even worse since his testimony. Administration assertions about Iraqi
training and readiness have been frequently, and credibly,

debunked. 

It’s not like we don’t have graphic evidence of the Iraqis’
inability or unwillingness to fight, either. Who can forget the pictures of the
mass refusal of recent “trainees” to serve, evidenced by their

stripping off their uniforms, en masse, following their “graduation”
ceremony in Fallujah?  A recent “pod” on the interactive television network

Current TV  also highlights this problem, as seen from the perspective of
soldiers “on the ground” who have been assigned the duty of training Iraqis. In
the video, entitled

“Inside Iraq: Training Iraqis,”  the film maker, an army lieutenant
stationed in Iraq, depicts vignettes of the exasperating nature of his task, at
one point telling the camera it’s going to take, in his opinion, at least five
years, and possibly ten, to adequately train the Iraqi military. 

All of this lends credence to the belief that there is, in
fact, absolutely no interest by this administration in “standing down,” or at
least not any time soon. This war has been the greatest gravy train in history
for what President Eisenhower called

“the military industrial complex” (read: 

Haliburton, et al). If there were any interest in bugging out of Iraq, would
the government be building

massive, permanent military bases in Iraq , or

resisting any efforts to limit funding for such bases . And how about using
the war as an excuse to conflate it with the threat of terrorism (i.e.,
“fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here”), as the
House most recently, and dramatically, did in its

election-driven resolution. Withdrawing from Iraq might also impede

the revolving door that so many high level homeland security operatives have
gone through to trade in their government positions for more lucrative jobs
in private security consulting.

If you believe
the administration has any intention of “standing down” in Iraq, then you’ll
believe it intends to abide by any of

the hundreds of laws the President has signified his intention of disobeying.