PRESIDENT OUT-OF-IT

Here’s what president Bush said last night about training new Iraqi troops:

“The best way for Iraq to be safe and secure is for Iraqi citizens to be trained to do the job. We’ve got 100,000 trained now, 125,000 by the end of this year, 200,000 by the end of next year.”

Most people would agree that this is a critical factor in winning the war in Iraq, perhaps the critical factor. Spencer Ackerman points out the following:

According to internal Pentagon documents recently obtained by Reuters, only 22,700 Iraqi forces have received enough training to be considered even “minimally effective.” Barely 8,000 of the 90,000-strong police force have completed a full eight weeks of training–after a year and a half of occupation. While Lieutenant General David Petraeus wrote in a Washington Post op-ed on Sunday that the Iraqi civil-intervention force is “now conducting operations,” the leaked Pentagon documents show that training hasn’t even begun for its 4,800 members. And perhaps most significantly, while Bush promised 200,000 Iraqis would be trained by the end of the next year, the documents state that it will take until July 2006 to train 135,000 Iraqi police officers.

Again, the problem isn’t the will or the resolve. It’s that our commander-in-chief doesn’t seem to have a clue about what’s actually happening on the ground. And that he’s not telling the truth – knowingly or unknowingly – to the American people.