Rational Grounds

First off, the Iraqis are not the ones who brought us all to this sorry place. We did. We are the power in Iraq, and have been since March 2003. The state of affairs there can and should be laid at our feet and no one else's.

But let's take Fred Kaplan's article first. Kaplan wants to tell us how we can leave Iraq by 2007.

Either way, some of Petraeus' aides, if not the general himself, have recently learned of rumors that Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari doesn't want his army to be well-trained. A leading Shiite, Jaafari reportedly fears that if the U.S. troops leave Iraq, the insurgents will crush all resistance and hoist the Sunnis back to power. Since the Americans have said they will leave once the Iraqi security forces are self-sufficient, Jaafari figures it's best to keep that day at bay. This could explain why many Iraqi units lack such basic materials as reliable weapons, ammunition, and sufficient food and bedding gear.

It could, if you had no memory of the past couple years at all. Kaplan earlier quotes a U.S. budget document stating that as of February of this year, "All but one of these 90 battalions, however, are lightly equipped and armed, and have very limited mobility and sustainment capabilities." Up to January of this year, Jaafari had little say in how the Iraqi troops were trained or equipped - that was our job. It still is. That the troops were at this depressing level in February 2005 is largely our fault, as is the fact that they are still at this level six months later. We've done a crappy job training and equipping them over the last two years.

What's more, the only source for these accusations are rumors that Gen. Petraeus' aides "have heard." I can't imagine that the staff tasked with training Iraqi troops for the past year would have any interest in shifting the blame for failure to someone else, could you?

Kaplan himself admits that we can't start the clock on Jaafari's responsibility until at least the beginning of this year, but never follows that up. Indeed, you can't blame Petraeus for this either, really. He started in June 2004, and before him Bernard Kerik had been in charge. Except that Kerik quit in mid-to-late August of 2003. Other than an assistant-chief constable from Britain, it appears that nobody was moving this forward in the meantime:

[Dec. 19, 2004 Meet the Press]SEN. JOE BIDEN, (D-DE): Absolutely true. Look, we all agree what the situation is now. We're paying a terrible price for the fundamental mistakes we made from the beginning that a majority of people around this table warned the administration against it. The de-Ba'athification in the extreme that took place was a serious mistake. Dick Lugar and I sat there almost two years ago with the then-envoy we had there, Mr. Bremer, and said this is a mistake. We went in with too few troops, we went in with too little legitimacy. The training program--I came back with Lindsey Graham, appeared on your show about eight months ago, and said it was a joke. There was no training program. Our own civilian director of the training facility in Iran[sic?], in a room alone with three senators, I asked her, "Is it worth it?" She said, "No. This is a joke." Came back and told the administration that. They paid no attention to it.

If anybody can find me the name of the individual in charge of the Iraqi troop training during the period of September 2003 to June 2004, I'm all ears.

On top of this, Iraqis have been stepping up and addressing their own security:

The first official to take action was Falah al-Naqib, interior minister under the interim government of Ayad Allawi. In September, Naqib formed his own regiment, the Special Police Commandos, drawn from veterans of Hussein's special forces and the Republican Guard. As its leader, he chose General Adnan, not only because Adnan had a useful collection of colleagues from Iraq's military and security networks, but also because Adnan is Naqib's uncle. Naqib did not ask for permission or training or even equipment from the United States military; he formed and armed the commandos because the U.S. military would not.

[...]

Initially, Petraeus wasn't even told of the commandos; Iraqis and American civilians at the Ministry of Interior had lost faith in the U.S. military.

But despite all this, Kaplan just speculates that Rumsfeld recently hinted at pulling out in order to light a fire under the Iraqis. Rather than, you know, because that puts us on a convenient timetable for the 2006 mid-term elections.

Kaplan's theory - that motivating the Iraqis to train their troops will get us out of Iraq faster - is unsupported by the facts in his article. But how do we get out of Iraq? Next, on Rational Grounds!