We'll Continue to Stand Up

Just thought you would all like to know that it's now official U.S. policy to do the civil war fighting in Iraq rather than having Iraqi's do their own fighting:

Training Iraqi troops no longer driving force in U.S. policy

By Nancy A. Youssef
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces.

Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration's Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said.

No change has been announced, and a Pentagon spokesman, Col. Gary Keck, said training Iraqis remains important. "We are just adding another leg to our mission," Keck said, referring to the greater U.S. role in establishing security that new troops arriving in Iraq will undertake.

But evidence has been building for months that training Iraqi troops is no longer the focus of U.S. policy. Pentagon officials said they know of no new training resources that have been included in U.S. plans to dispatch 28,000 additional troops to Iraq. The officials spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they aren't authorized to discuss the policy shift publicly. Defense Secretary Robert Gates made no public mention of training Iraqi troops on Thursday during a visit to Iraq.

Damned right the haven't announced it yet. And I wouldn't hold my breath that there will ever be any official U.S. representative who is willing to say this to the press.

It's not really "news" in the sense that we already knew this from the reality on the ground. But (as Rummy would say) "one" has to wonder what the plan is down the road? Kill every Sunni?