I think 'training' the Iraqis is a waste of time, money & lives.

[Philosoraptor]

The crazy president needs billions more to 'train' the Iraqis to defend themselves. What utter bullshit.

Train them for what? Train them, like you train animals to do tricks? How demeaning is that? How insulting, suggesting that all they need over there is some GI training to straighten out their ancient civil war.

Like all other words, they've removed the original meaning of the word 'training', and only use it to confuse and delay the so called war.

[demnan]

1. Train them to give over all their oil

n/t

[liberal renegade]

2. I wouldn't be

one bit surprised to hear that the Iraqi Army has been penetrated with Iraqi insurgents top to bottom.

[Cosmocat]

9. Uh ...

YEAH ... They have been talking about "training" the Iraqis since day freakin one ... Four years later, they are acting like this is some kind of new thing ...

Bottom line, these people are just flat different from us ... Different values, different work ethic ... Two things made this country what it is today ... The willingness to work hard and the innate sense of WORKING TOGETHER ... These people have been around 10 times longer than the people in our country, and after just 200 years have been lapped 10 times ...

They just don't have what we have, in terms of working together in a democratic manner ... It is, I hate to quote the moron "hard work" ... DARN hard work ... AND, a sense of working together, which these people just do not have ...

We could "train" them for 100 years and they would not be what we are ... They would not work together in a productive manner ... Fact is, that country was held together by a dictator for a reason ... That is what they needed to maintain social order and control ... Until THEY find it within THEMSELVES to have social order in a different manner, there is nothing we can do ...

[Lilith Velkor]

13. "working together in a democratic manner?"

Like we did with the Indians and the slaves?

[acmejack]

3. They seem pretty damn proficient now.

If you ask me.

[leesa]

4. The point is to keep the chaos alive so that US troops are needed 'forever'

Does it make sense now? It arms them and keeps the war going so the Neocons have justification for keeping troops there. They told us flat out they intend to stay for 30 years or longer. They are taking the oil and they will need to protect it.

[magellan]

5. What Bush**'s war boils down to is extended and costly containment

...in terms of US national security, tax dollars AND lives.

Before the invasion Saddam was contained, no American soldiers were dying, and there were no terrorists in Iraq (we didn't already know about, e.g. Zarqawi and Ansar al-Islam, and they weren't conspiring against the US). We were spending a couple of billion a year to do this.

Four years on we're stuck in the middle of a hopeless civil war at a cost of $2 billion a week, have suffered over 3000 US deaths, and our reward is a brand new terrorist group to deal with: al Qaeda in Iraq, whose main force consists of radicalized Sunnis.

Not to mention the utter decimation of our military in the areas of recruitment, equipment, preparedness and morale.

What was the question again?

[sinkingfeeling]

6. I agree and we should have learned that lesson well back in the early 1960's when

we sent 16,000 US soldiers to 'train' the South Vietnamese!

[elehhhhna]

7. The Military's trainers have been replaced by Contractors.

IIRC, average annual cost fora Mil trainer is well under 100K, cost for each contractor-trainer is like 250K (gross, including markup.)

As long as there's money to be skimmed, the BA's on it.

[butterfly77]

8. They have been saying this..

for the past two to three years, and everytime someone says to change strategy they say they the Iraqis are almost ready, then some more violence erupts and they add more troops. They had a group of Iraqis that they say they had trained and they told them they would be stationed in Baghdad and they threw a fit and began discarding their uniforms saying they did not want to go to baghdad,this was last year.

[Poiuyt]

10. Lawrence Korb said that the Iraqis don't need training, they need motivation

[Avalux]

11. They're not going to train Iraqis.

They're going to give troops cash to carry around and hand out to Iraqis. Seriously. Heard it on CNN this morning.

[Lex]

12. One thing that Repub Sen. Gordon Smith said . . .

when he was explaining on the Senate floor why he is no longer with the President with staying in Iraq was:

"But we cannot want democracy for Iraq more than they want it for themselves."

That sentence really stayed with me.

That's really been Bush's final lie about why we're still there, with the purple fingers and all that PR garbage. But it's perhaps the most bogus reason of all that's been given.