it wasn't all that long ago that president bush's favorite line about iraq was this:
I have said to the American people, as the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down.at least if you believe pentagon press releases concerning the gross number of "trained" iraqis, there are 298,000 iraqi troops. that's more than twice the number of american forces in the country, an 851% increase from the number of iraqi troops in august 2003. that looks to me like iraqi forces "standing up."
but wait, that's not quite it. the chart also has this "readiness tier" line. i find that line to be really intriguing. back when bush first started talking about iraqi forces, it was a binary thing. iraqi soldiers were either trained or not. once they were trained, they had "stood up" and were ready to take on the role of securing iraq. at least that was the impression i got when i heard the speech--that's why bush would tout the number of trained iraqi forces. if training alone wasn't enough to qualify as "stood up", then what was the point of citing those numbers?
anyway, i googled around and found this pentagon press release which explains the top two tiers as follows: "level one" means a "fully independent" units and "level two" means units "their own areas of operation." there's also level three, troops that are able to provide a supporting role to u.s. forces. level four is not defined. presumably, they're not capable of much at all. (it's also worth noting that the numbers in the october 2005 DOD press release don't jive with the current pentagon figures that went into the NYTimes chart. i'm guessing that means that general petraeus' figures were revised downward at some point in the next 10 months)
so putting it all together, we got three hundred thousand iraqi troops trained but only one-third of that number are really capable of acting on their own. still, with 100,000 capable iraqi forces, shouldn't that mean that 100k american forces should be coming home?
(see also kevin drum)
