Regarding its performance in Iraq, the Bush administration's best hope at this point is for the American citizenry to be stricken with amnesia. Here's today's case in point:
In a paragraph buried within the Pentagon's quarterly report that was released on Friday, it was stated that while more and more Iraqi security forces are being trained, there is not a single Iraqi battalion that can operate on its own without American assistance.
That's quite interesting, because last September, the top American commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, testified on Capitol Hill that one Iraqi battalion was capable of operating without American assistance.
And a few months before that, the Pentagon announced that three battlions were capable of operating without American assistance.
Non-amnesiacs might well ask these questions: how does this backsliding square with the ongoing administration assurances that "progress" is being made? And if the independent battalions have indeed gone from three to one to zero, how might that affect the administration's announced desire to begin pulling out U.S. troops this year (Bush on Friday again: "As the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down")?
About Me
- Dick Polman
- Cited by the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the nation's top political reporters, and lauded by the ABC News political website as "one of the finest political journalists of his generation," Dick Polman is a national political columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. This online column is cited by The Washington Post as one of the top five mainstream political blogs in the country, and is touted by former "Hardball" TV producer Howard Mortman as "the immediately must-read political blog." Dick has been a frequent guest on C-Span, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and the BBC. He covered the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential campaigns. In his 22 years at the Inquirer, he has also been a foreign correspondent based in London; a baseball writer covering the Philadelphia Phillies; a general-assignment writer in the feature section; and a longtime Sunday magazine contributor. In the early '80s, he wrote three metro columns a week for the Hartford Courant. A graduate of George Washington University, today Dick is on the full-time faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as "writer in residence."