A New (Yawn) Plan in Iraq

I just switched off the President’s speech. I know it’s supposed to go another five to ten minutes but, to be honest, I’ve heard everything I need to hear. I flipped over to the Washington Wizards game because…well…at least Gilbert Arenas is interested in winning decisively. The President? Meh…I couldn’t really tell you.

What we needed tonight was not some bureaucratic yawner of a laundry list. That’s what we do in the background. What we needed tonight was for the President to name names: Ahmadinejad, al-Sadr, Assad, al-Maliki. We needed the President to say, flat out, that Iraq is the way it is largely because its neighbors are attacking its citizens every single day. We needed the President to give us all a shot in the arm, a reason to stay in there and keep swinging against the implacable enemy that’s not going to go away no matter how many oil revenue-sharing plans we announce on national television.

Mostly, though, we needed a shot of reality. It would have been preferable, when the President talked about training a police force, for him to ask us all how long we really thinks it takes to train a competent and experienced police department? Then he could tell us why training a few thousand police officers, then turning those newbies out on the street without a veteran group of Corporals and Sergeants is such an amazingly stupid idea that it nearly warps the fabric of reality to even consider it. He could ask us if we would tolerate living with a police department full of officers whose average length of service is about a year. Then he’d tell us all to wake the heck up and stop being so blinded by the platitudes and happy talk of those who could care less whether we succeed or fail in Iraq.

Here is a fact: it takes about six months to train an officer to patrol in his own. That includes time in the academy and time in field training. It requires an experienced senior officer for every recruit who is not only experienced and excellent but is also trained to do the field training.

Let me tell you, you just can’t walk up to the nearest Field Training Officer tree and pluck yourself a few dozen of them. You have to develop them, which takes time. You have to be able to see them in action over the course of more than just a couple months to find out not only whether they are a good officer but also whether they have any aptitude toward training at all.

Training a competent police force takes years. If the president doesn’t know that himself, he surely has plenty of people around him who do. That’s what he should have told us, without varnish.

I’m incredibly unimpressed with the President’s speech and his plan. I’m not sure where in the plan is the part where we start kicking terrorist tail back across the borders of Iran and Syria. I didn’t hear where there was much in the way of not tolerating the anti-American rabble-rousing of Moqtada al-Sadr. I didn’t hear a single bit of impatience toward al-Maliki for choosing to cozen killers instead of work toward the purpose for which he was elected.

I was hoping, perhaps beyond hope, that I’d see some Churchill creep back into President Bush. What I got was some bland Johnson/Kissinger-esque pile of bland mush. I’m quite confident our enemies heard that too and I’ll bet that they’re feeling a whole lot more confident about their prospects than I am about ours.

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Category: Fighting the Islamists, The Long War Here At Home