Operation Deja Vu

[babylonsister]

http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,138136,00.html

Operation Deja Vu
Jeff Huber | June 05, 2007

David S. Cloud and Damien Cave of the New York Times report that the push in Baghdad isn't measuring up. A U.S. assessment, completed in May, showed that American and Iraqi troops control less than one third of the city's neighborhoods, far short of the projected goal.

Brigadier General Vincent K. Brooks, the deputy commander of the U.S. division in charge of Baghdad, says that Iraqi security forces are a major cause of the lack of progress. Iraqis were expected to man checkpoints and conduct patrols. But, as we have seen so often in the past, Iraq hasn't delivered all the forces they promised, and in some cases, the forces that did show up have performed poorly. As a result, American commanders have been forced to clear some portions of the city multiple times.

The "surge" has turned into Operation Déjà Vu.

Once again, we've tried a new strategy in Iraq, but the pattern hasn't changed. We go into an area and the bad guys lie low or run away. We leave the area--or turn it over to Iraqis--and the bad guys come back. Significant portions of the Iraqi forces committed to an operation don't show up. The ones who do show up are unreliable and/or untrustworthy.

snip//

Rachel Stohl, a senior analyst with the Center for Defense Information, says that "The United States has no idea what happened to the majority of weapons it brought into the country." But we do know, she says, that, "…these weapons, in conjunction with the millions already in the country left from Saddam's era, are being used to perpetuate the violence and continued instability throughout Iraq."

Giving Iraqi troops harder-to-traffic M-16s is supposed to stem the tide of arms transfers from us to the bad guys, but it won't amount to a gob of spit in the Chesapeake Bay. There are enough loose weapons in country now to keep the insurgency going indefinitely.

So it's little wonder we won't have Baghdad secured by July. Or by September. Or by next September, or the September after that…