That's the gist of
this article.
Okay, let me get this straight: Bush wants to arm a bunch of 18 and 19 year-old Iraqis and drop them into the Sunni Triangle to start taking bullets?
Furthermore, Bush wants to cut back on the training time for these conscripts so they can start taking those bullets even sooner?
Everything about this screams "bad idea".
Don't get me wrong: I fully support recruiting and training an Iraqi police force to help supplement our troops over there. What I'm not in favor of is skimping on the training of those recruits.
There are two big concerns I have about this choice. One is with the Bush Administration's logic. They believe that Iraqi recruits will be better able to identify potential attackers, because they a) speak the language, and b) know the terrain better than U.S. troops. I contest that notion with the fact that our highly-trained, well-equipped troops are already skittish enough that they've shot innocent civilians. You put a poorly-trained, meagerly-equipped young Iraqi into a war zone and he's going to be that much more likely to pop some local citizen out for a stroll because the guy "looked suspicious".
Furthermore, we all know just how sensitive the Bush Administration was to the social and religious history of Iraq. So sensitive that it didn't even take those factors into account. The Sunni Triangle isn't called the Sunni Triangle for nothing. It's largely populated with Sunnis, who have historical beef with Shi'a Muslims. And one cannot count the dissention between the various tribes. With Bush's history of ignoring such factors, I don't credit his administration with enough foresight to know that it might not be a good idea to put certain recruits in certain areas. The locals might be more inclined to attack the recruits, and the recruits might be more inclined to attack the locals.
If this is Bush's answer to getting the U.N. and other humanitarian aid organizations, which are pulling out of Iraqi, to come back, I think he's going to find the results to be wholly inadequate. If I was Annan or an aid association leader, I'd be less than impressed with this latest offering from Bush.