Martini Republic » Meet the New Iraq Strategy — same as the Old Iraq Strategy: "New! Improved! It’s BushCo’s fabulous National Strategy for Victory in Iraq™!

You can read the whole pile of crap here. It looks like it was put together by a campaign staffer or a Madison Avenue public relations firm. It isn’t a strategy, it is a sales pitch, for the same old stinking product — Stay the Course.

This is obvious from the very beginning — the very first sentence in fact, which reads:

The following document articulates the broad strategy the President set forth in 2003 and provides an update on our progress as well as the challenges remaining.

Remember that ‘strategy?’ The one that failed to account for insurgents, to plan for an occupation? The strategy that assumed we’d be greeted as liberators, and that the war would pay for itself with the oil?"

(Via Martini Republic.)

ArmsControlWonk | an arms control weblog: Images of US Policy Toward Iraq: "

'As of November 2005, there were more than 212,000 trained and equipped Iraqi Security Forces, compared with 96,000 in September of last year.'

Iraq did not, however, have 96,000 trained and equipped Iraqi Security Forces (like the dapper fellows at right) in September 2004.

Adam Entous with Reuters obtained internal Defense Department documents in September 2004 that revealed only 8,169 had completed the full eight-week academy training. 46,176 of what are publicly called ‘trained and equipped’ forces were listed privately as ‘untrained.’

Trained, untrained. What are you, a semiologist?

One wonders how many of the ‘212,000 trained and equipped Iraqi Security Forces’ are, well, trained or equipped."

(Via ArmsControlWonk.com.)