American Ground Units Contradict Patreaus

The President is misleading the public about the competence of Gen. Patreaus.

Comments from those supposedly enjoying the benefits of this training show the training is not accomplishing what it was intended; but is at odds with the local culture, and providing the insurgency with assistance.

These issues fail to consider the larger problems of the real Iraqi situation: This has mushroomed from a "simple" insurgency into a different creature: A civil war.

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Summary

Ref The emails of Marine Captain Rob Secher should be considered in light of the insurgency and civil war; then contrasted with the legacy Bush appears to have fabricated related to the new commander Patreaus.

Details

Recall the information we have about Patraeus: The training he provided had problems.

Consider what we also know: The troops at the other end, providing that training, had reservations.

His job there was one of the toughest in Iraq: making raw Iraqi recruits ready and able to take over the fight against the militants.Ref

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Some of the trainees were insurgents, gleefully thanking the Americans for the training on how to defeat Americans:

the U.S. trainers giving instruction in combat techniques eventually will see that knowledge turned against us by their students. “All they really teach is how to fight Americans,” says Van Creveld. “How stupid can they be?” Ref

There were issues of loyalty:

[Secher was] suspicions that some of his trainees were loyal to Moqtada al-Sadr and would have no compunction about betraying their American instructors if the radical Shiite cleric told them to.Ref

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What are the Americans trying to impose? The Iraqis were not accepting the Western Style military, supposedly what Bush says is needed.

The biggest lesson I have learned over 6 months here is that the Iraqi culture is incapable of maintaining a western style military. The Arabic-style military [...] is distasteful to western soldiers: officers who hit their men; officers and senior enlisted men who regularly steal from their men; using leadership to openly grant yourself more food and 'standard of living' items while your men go without [...] . . .Many of our [Iraqi] soldiers went AWOL; new food supplies came in yesterday from Ramadi but were grossly insufficient; new soldiers arrived but their initial military training is substandard and you can tell they are really just here for a paycheck [...] Ref