U.S. May Scrap Costly Efforts to Train Iraqi Police
Source: NYT
In the face of spiraling costs and Iraqi officials who say they never wanted it in the first place, the State Department has slashed and may jettison entirely by the end of the year a multibillion-dollar police training program that was to have been the centerpiece of a hugely expanded civilian mission here.
What was originally envisioned as a training cadre of about 350 American law enforcement officers was quickly scaled back to 190 and then to 100. The latest restructuring calls for 50 advisers, but most experts and even some State Department officials say even they may be withdrawn by the end of this year.
The training effort, which began in October and has already cost $500 million, was conceived of as the largest component of a mission billed as the most ambitious American aid effort since the Marshall Plan. Instead, it has emerged as the latest high-profile example of the waning American influence here following the military withdrawal, and it reflects a costly miscalculation on the part of American officials, who did not count on the Iraqi government to assert its sovereignty so aggressively.
I think that with the departure of the military, the Iraqis decided to say, O.K., how large is the American presence here? said James F. Jeffrey, the American ambassador to Iraq, in an interview. How large should it be? How does this equate with our sovereignty? In various areas they obviously expressed some concerns.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/world/middleeast/us-may-scrap-costly-effort-to-train-iraqi-police.html?pagewanted=all
Webster Green
(13,905 posts)Next I'll be hearing that we're no longer painting schools over there. That would really fuck my head up.
How is the chimp's super-embassy working out? Last I heard, the electrical contractor had run like 16 gauge wire or something throughout the place.
What an stupid adventure.
solarman350
(136 posts)--looks like the Iraqinization is succeeding about as well as "Vietnamization" did....in U.S. Hegemony daze gone long past..long enuf for most of us not to have remembered how well that didn't work out.
OnyxCollie
(9,958 posts)We'll lose all our fragile gains!
Better give it another 150 billion and wait a couple Friedman Units (FU) before we do anything rash.
benld74
(9,904 posts)THAT IS COMING AS WELL FOLK!
THANKS ALOT W!
Thanks
A
Lot,,,,,,,,,,,,,
Woody Woodpecker
(562 posts)Coming your way.....
A testament of wasted taxpayer dollars.
Seriously.
chill_wind
(13,514 posts)"A lesson given by an American police instructor to a class of Iraqi trainees neatly encapsulated the programs failings. There are two clues that could indicate someone is planning a suicide attack, the instructor said: a large bank withdrawal and heavy drinking.
The problem with that advice, which was recounted by Ginger Cruz, the former deputy inspector general at the American Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, was that few Iraqis have bank accounts and an extremist Sunni Muslim bent on carrying out a suicide attack is likely to consider drinking a cardinal sin. "
We've been there 9 years.
If we haven't gotten the training thing done, and still can't get it done now, this might be one small clue why.
sad sally
(2,627 posts)the handwriting on the wall - that keeping combat troops for another 18 months and 20,000+ trainers, special ops, and who knows what other non-peace keepers for 10 years past 2014 will turn out to be an ever more expensive deadly failure than Iraq?
grasswire
(50,130 posts)....and why are the blood-suckers not in prison?