Iraqi, U.S. Forces Trade Barbs Over Failures – ending a war responsibly

Although strictly speaking this is not all Obama’s fault, but rather a combination of the Bush attempts at a limited pullout, Obama’s campaign pledges for an end of the war and mostly the Iraqi insistence on no troops left behind, Obama’s “responsible end to the war” claim is nonetheless bogus.

The apparent results of this fiasco give credibility to the fool heartiness of starting the war in the first place. We have yet another demonstration of the wasted sacrifices of the American military. All for what you might ask. And we also have an example of how not to end a war “responsibly” because there is not one thing responsible about it, not to the Iraqi people, to our future security and mostly to the troops who gave so much for some objective which now appears irrelevant.

What we don’t seem to comprehend in Iraq or elsewhere in that part of the world is what I highlighted in bold below. There are no Iraqi people or Afghan people or Syrian people as we think of the American people and we also cannot understand the role of religion in government and society in the Middle East either of which is why we cannot do much of anything “responsibly.”

The Iraqi forces’ rout by a ragtag militia this week shocked politicians in Baghdad and Washington, but the troops and their American trainers have been warning for years that the Iraqi military wasn’t ready for battle.

Each side blames the other. Iraqi military officers say they were left ill-prepared and underequipped by the departing U.S. forces. The U.S. officers who trained them say that Iraqi troops paid little heed to American military advice after they pulled out.

“When we left, all of those institutions that we designed to professionalize the Iraqi security forces left with us,” said Lt. Gen. Robert Caslen, who was in charge of training Iraqi soldiers from September 2011 to May 2013 and is now the superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Iraq’s military is hobbled by sectarian tension and favoritism that has eroded the chain of command, he said.

The U.S. military helped the Iraqi military parcel out positions among its Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish divisions. But many officers bucked the chain of command to deal directly with officers from their own groups.

The U.S. military built training institutions and warehouses filled with highly advanced technological equipment—all of which the Iraqi army made little use of after U.S. troops departed, Gen. Caslen said.

Although Iraqi officers don’t dispute this, they say U.S. troops left before modern military culture could penetrate the Iraqi army’s calcified institutions.

via Iraqi, U.S. Forces Trade Barbs Over Failures – WSJ.