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Somebody had better let the boy king know that the colonists are getting uppity again. 

Seems the Iraqi’s started thinking they could run their own government.  Good thing someone made them fire that publicly honest employee…wouldn’t want the Iraqis to learn that sunshine and open government are to be supported or anything.

"It is going to take them some time to work through the details and mechanics of all these things," Hadley said. He said his Iraqi national security counterpart was obviously going to have to address questions raised by the press reports and "some concerns on the Hill," but he urged some time, space, advice, counsel. "There’s a lot to be discussed," Hadley said.

Or not discussed. Al-Maliki promptly accepted the resignation of the aide who described the amnesty plan. The Washington Post reports today that the aide, Adnan Ali al-Kadhimi, stands by his account that amnesty might be extended to those who have not been involved in killing Iraqis, which of course is what al-Maliki himself suggested, and which, I understand, was briefed to U.S. officials.

I guess the whole issue will be swept under the rug, that is, until Baghdad indeed unveils its amnesty plan and it turns out to be exactly what the fired aide was describing.

While I’d sure love it if the Bush Administration stopped lying to me and everyone else in the American public, I’m not exactly holding my breath on it stopping. Especially after reading this:

It seems that the U.S. has decided to stop releasing detailed readiness reports. The decision, Hearst says, came after the publicly released reports "showed a steady decline in the number of qualified Iraqi units."

That number is now classified. I spoke to a JCS source about this report. It appears that the issue in "the building" is that the four-tiered system used for rating Iraqi units was too stringent and perhaps "misleading."

Under the system, Iraqi units are rated Levels 1 through 4, from most capable to least prepared, and though the Pentagon rated three Iraqi battalions in Level 1 — "capable of conducting attacks without U.S. involvement" — last June, by February, no Iraqi battalions were so rated….

The solution? Well, guess what, it isn’t to get more Iraqi units to Level 1 or come up with new standards that might reflect combat readiness; instead, the Pentagon decided to make the numbers classified. The Pentagon now rolls statistics into a larger grouping that combines Level 1 and Level 2….

According to briefing materials prepared for the President’s trip, Iraqi security forces are projected to reach their "end-state" strength of more than 325,000 members in December. The new metric of readiness is how many square miles of Iraq indigenous units have assumed responsibility for. That has shown a two-thirds increase since the beginning of the year.

In Baghdad meanwhile, Iraqi national security adviser Mowaffak Rubaie magically released a captured al Qaeda in Iraq document yesterday, a document that gives a gloomy assessment of the state of terrorist forces and the insurgency. Never mind that the language of the document immediately called its authenticity into question….

Oh yeah. Truthiness has become a perfected art form, hasn’t it?  Our troops and military families deserve a whole lot better than this, as do the rest of us.  And the Republicans in the House ought to be ashamed of themselves for turning the ten hour debate last week into a political prop and a sham instead of having meaningful discussion of what needs to be done.  Has Donald Rumsfeld been fired yet?

Had enough?

Related posts:

  1. Torture: Obama Heeded Maliki on Abuse Photos, Says McClatchy; What That Says for Our Occupation
  2. Pride And Petulance
  3. Changing of the Guard: US Troops Withdraw from Iraqi Cities; Maliki Declares “Sovereignty Day”
  4. In Iraq, As in So Many Contexts, Withdrawal is Victory
  5. Remember Iraq or Ray Odierno is Still Wrong