The sole Iraqi battalion capable of fighting on their own, has been downgraded to not even being able to fight on their own. They can’t fight without US support.

So let me get this right. For three years the US has been training tens, or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, forming battalions to fight, and they are incapable of doing so, or are we seeing a war of words? This is the same group of people who fought a war with Iran for seven years, who formed the mighty and vaunted Republican Guard. These are the people that the world was supposed to be afraid of, and the US can’t train 700-800 men to fight on their own?

Is it really that the Iraqis can’t fight? Are they such pathetic fighters? Or is it the US troops who train them are focusing on constructing an army rather than elite battalions? Are they doing such a bad job that in a nation of 25+million, 700-800 cannot be trained to fight as a coherent force on their own?

Good Lord. This situation should be a national shame for Iraq, right?! As the National Debunker puts it, the Tinkerbell Battalions… And Taylor Marsh seems to believe that this is part of a plan to keep the US there for a very long time.

But, Red State is a little more optimistic than I am. They point out that this merely means that the Iraqi troops at “level 2″ (the level to which that one “level 1″ battalion has been downgraded) require coalition fire support etc.,

Big Lizards is also a little leery of CNN, pointing out in an excellent post:

The really important metric is not how many elite Level One battalions the Iraqi Army has, but the number of competent Level Two battalions. CNN mentions that as an aside, as if it’s of no real importance.

The training level of the Iraqi Security Force, which is under the control of the Iraq Interior Ministry, was considerably behind the level of the Iraqi Army under the U.S. Military’s control. But even the Iraqi Security Force now has over 100 battalions of Levels Two and Three. That is great news indeed, for all that CNN wants to focus on what it simplistically sees as the negative.