we taught them everything they know

April 3, 2008 by lestro

by lestro

Well, we’ve done a heckuva job in Iraq and have obviously trained the Iraqi leadership to the absolute best of our leadership’s abilities, as apparent by the Iraqi push into Basra last week that stirred up the Mahdi army:

… interviews with a wide range of American and military officials also suggest that Mr. Maliki overestimated his military’s abilities and underestimated the scale of the resistance. The Iraqi prime minister also displayed an impulsive leadership style that did not give his forces or that of his most powerful allies, the American and British military, time to prepare. “He went in with a stick and he poked a hornet’s nest, and the resistance he got was a little bit more than he bargained for,” said one official in the multinational force in Baghdad who requested anonymity. “They went in with 70 percent of a plan. Sometimes that’s enough. This time it wasn’t.” As the Iraqi military and civilian casualties grew and the Iraqi planning appeared to be little more than an improvisation, the United States mounted an intensive military and political effort to try to turn around the situation, according to accounts by Mr. Crocker and several American military officials in Baghdad and Washington who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A leader with good intentions and bad advice who went lumbering into a battle with no exit strategy and a vastly underestimated sense of the insurgency that was waiting for them?

why does that sound familiar? oh yeah.

But the comparisons don’t end there.

It seem that top advisers to the prime minister told Maliki he would need more troops and better planning, but like another impetuous world leader who always thinks he knows what’s best (despite what even his generals tell him), Maliki opted to go it alone:

“It was a unilateral decision by Maliki,” said an American official familiar with the session. “It was a fait accompli.”…

But if Mr. Maliki was determined to act, General Petraeus advised him not to rush into a fight without carefully sizing up the situation and making adequate preparations, the official said.

No wonder President Bush called him “the right guy for Iraq…”