GEN. CASEY: I mean, there are a lot of variables that are involved here, Senator.
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October 9, 2005
WB: Numbers Racket
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Hmmm. Back when I had more time for this sort of thing, I used to read the State Department’s Iraq Weekly Status Reports for the training numbers. I’m pretty sure they are “definitive” (if deceptive).
Looks like my source stopped linking to the reports on their site on Sept 21. Anyone know where else to find them?
Oh–a great post from Billmon, by the way. And let us not forget that The Powerball Church Lady used to run numbers for Bush in Texas.
As we are all or most of us armchair generals, W is referring to operational pay roll strength that can be counted at a fixed date, pay day. This is probably a function of the Iraqi govt that is helped by a subcontractor (and consultants) hired by Halliburton. That is the number that we’re paying for and technically unfortunately Busholini will be correct.
Sen. McCain gets out of Gen. Casey the actual number of Kurds that can be rounded up to insert into a local ethnic clean up op any given week. That is a length of time under the cloud of war and actual soldiers in a fighting role will be an operational estimate.
This is a topic which concerned the subjectivity of numbers (except for pay roll dollars dispersed for ISF) that our senators covered with Rice during her confirmation questioning that I can barely remember. My current events memory is down to two days. Working with allies that you have to pay is hard work as Barbara Tuchman records in Stilwell and the American Experience in China on Generalissimo Chiang and his straw man army in the fight against the Japanese. Today this is an example when the chips are down and the match is tough of W unleashing his inner Chiang.
Cheney or one of his mouthpieces will simply complain of the high cost of this meddling questioning by Senators. The intentions are good. Governing an Iraqi society made new is difficult work, who would think it was going to be this hard. It’s not artwork where you just make it up and network for a good review. You’d have to own an advertising agency to do that. They are making progress establishing a govt, look at this great acronym ISF, Iraqi Security Forces. See we are spreading security; only the bad guys would resisit that.
Posted by: christofay | Oct 10 2005 2:08 utc | 2
Hmmm, where have I heard something like this before? Oh, yeah:
“I have here in my hand a list…”
Soon it will be as it was in the Old Country, when our dear Fuehrer was ordering forth entire divisions from within his bunker.
Divisions that only existed in his faulty thinking.
Oh, well. At least God is still on our side.
Isn’t she?
Posted by: Antifa | Oct 10 2005 6:52 utc | 4
This is a curious problem, so they have trained up 1 battalion — which to US war standards, would mean if they are infantry, 4 companies in the field, maybe at most 400 men actually in the field, trained and capable of independent missions. One can only conclude, unless the generals at the hearing are suffering some kind of group dementia (it’s happened before), that the US is not really training up an independent Iraqi army, like they keep saying they are. But are instead going through the motions of training an army, while keeping it toothless and intentionally ineffectual — until the political process coagulates into a more reliable (but still brain dead) mass. This of course produces a catch-22 in that the puppet government can never reach credibility, in terms of providing security, if it has’nt the trained and autonomous forces to act, while at the same time, giving the government trained forces could undermine US security, which is not only testament to who is really calling the shots, but also the depth of trust already established.
It’s anybodys guess how long the military establishment will go on parading themselves before the civilian leadership, as either a poor imitation of a Marx brothers movie or even more pathetically, in imitation of Hitlers generals in the movie“Downfall”. Although it is a little hard to imagine any of the brass (or civilian types) going so far as taking the glass pill for the (W)hat is it fucking now, boy wonder. Although, Hitler, in his last days, and (W) do share one thing unmistakeably, and that would be the contempt for their respective populations — and deserved (in Hitlers words) whatever retrabution and suffering that would result in their failure to deliver on the glory he so innocently dreamed up — and they so willingly sucked up.
Posted by: anna missed | Oct 10 2005 9:44 utc | 5
@AM:
Maybe no one wants to “stand up” for the central government, as they are more oriented to their sect than to the central gov.
Must show up on pay day though!
Maybe Boss Tweed is in charge of recruiting the New Iraqi Army(TM).
Posted by: Groucho | Oct 10 2005 11:41 utc | 6
Tenet’s Revenge
Porter Goss can’t afford to rattle any more skeletons at the CIA.
There’s no reason why Porter Goss, the embattled director of the CIA, can’t declassify and make public the agency’s internal investigation of its less-than-stellar counterterrorism accomplishments before September 11. And there’s no reason why Goss can’t reprimand any current or former CIA officers, including former Director George Tenet, if they deserve it. (Whether they in fact deserve it depends at least in part on what the report says.) But he won’t.
‘The report, written by the CIA’s inspector general, was commissioned by Congress in December 2002 and delivered to Congress last summer. Democrats, sensing yet another opportunity to tar George W. Bush with the intelligence community’s failures, would love to have it made public — but Goss, and Republicans on the congressional intelligence committees, are content to sit on it. Since it was delivered, Goss has declared his opposition to releasing the report to the public, even in redacted form. Then, on Wednesday, the CIA announced that no disciplinary action would be taken against any of the 20 past and present CIA officials reported to have come under criticism in the report.
‘But there are several hidden crosscurrents at work.’
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 10 2005 13:53 utc | 7
Groucho,
Your not behind all this are you?……….. I know, I know, “There aint no Sanity Clause”
Posted by: anna missed | Oct 10 2005 19:20 utc | 8