The Flip Side of "If it's Dead, it's VC"...

Apparently is, "If it's a live body, it's part of the Iraqi defense force."This is so goddamned pathetic--calling little league ballplayers "future major league champions" would make more sense. The Independent has more details:

Training of Iraq's security forces, crucial to any exit strategy for Britain and the US, is going so badly that the Pentagon has stopped giving figures for the number of combat-ready indigenous troops, The Independent on Sunday has learned.

Instead, only figures for troops "on hand" are issued. The small number of soldiers, national guardsmen and police capable of operating against the country's bloody insurgency is concealed in an overall total of Iraqis in uniform, which includes raw recruits and police who have gone on duty after as little as three weeks' training. In some cases they have no weapons, body armour or even documents to show they are in the police...

David Isenberg, an analyst at the British and American Security Council, said "disaster is too polite a word" for efforts to train Iraqi forces. "We are not being honest about the numbers," he added. "We have no consensus about who has been trained, about who we are talking about."...

The Iraqi police force is considered the biggest failure, being poorly equipped and trained. US officials also say that tens of thousands of Iraqis are claiming police salaries but are not working, and nearly half of the force has been sent for further training.

A police colonel told the IoS: "I keep on hearing that we have been trained and we have been given the arms necessary by the Americans. But I seem to have missed all that. We have had people sent here who I would not trust at all. I have discovered that the Americans have made no checks on these men. Do you wonder why police stations and army barracks get blown up?"

Coupled with this farce is the fact that the new interim government will be dominated by the Sistani faction with probable assistance from Kurdish elements--that is, we're likely to see both a distinctive tilt towards Iranian style government AND increased Kurdish autonomy, both of which are failures from a US policy point of view. US soldiers and Iraqi civilians will continue to die, although media coverage of the former will abate (who will want to report on the deaths of US soldiers in furtherance of theocracy?), and coverage of the latter will remain almost nonexistent.

Oh, and on the other side of the aisle, John Kerry demonstrated, as James Doolittle points out, why he lost the election:

Democratic Sen. John Kerry, whose baffling explanation of votes on Iraq war funding hurt his 2004 White House bid, said on Tuesday he would back President Bush's new $81.9 billion request for Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I think we're in a very different situation," Kerry told reporters. "I'm going to vote for this ... I think this money is important to our being successful and to the completion of the process."

Wanker. Twenty years in the Senate apparently has turned his brain to mush. The war is over--and the U.S. LOST. No amount of grandstanding, bloviating, cheerleading, or anything else will change this. It's OVER. Iraqis have made it resoundingly clear that they want us OUT: insurgents are giving EIGHT divisions all they can handle, the "vote," as weird as it was, will install a government that wants a timetable for the withdrawal of US forces, revelations that resupply is now as often as not handled by air drop underscores the point that we don't control the roads, the level of lawlessness in cities is frightening and the occupation forces can do NOTHING to stop it--and Kerry, of all people, thinks it can be turned around? Somebody might want to let the Kerry family know that their patriarch has misplaced his spine.