In Iraq, the pullout of U.S. troops is picking up pace. By Sept. 1, the number of U.S. forces in Iraq will be pared to about 50,000 troops, part of a massive drawdown to continue in 2011 under an agreement negotiated with Baghdad.
But many Iraqi soldiers, especially at installations recently placed in their control by the U.S. military, have come to rely on American largesse to keep the facilities running.
And as U.S. troops withdraw, many Iraqis feel a growing mistrust of the Iraq security forces that are supposed to protect them. Some of the Iraqi forces behave with impunity, and as a result, Iraqis say, they are now more afraid of them than the insurgency.
That has some Iraqi security officials wondering whether they can trust their government to fund the army and police as the Americans have. And the situation has some Iraqis wondering if they can rely on their own Iraqi forces.
Four or even two years ago, was NPR making these types of stories about how much many the Iraqi’s actually want American troops? If they were, I must have missed it.
I wouldn’t believe anything I heard on National People’s Radio. I listen to its classical music programming every day, but it’s news and commentary is nothing but unrelenting leftist propaganda.
The problem here is that our amateur-hour administration used political decision making, instead of strategic military decision making in deciding when to begin pulling troops out. In my opinion, most knowledgeable folks understood this was too soon and that the Iraqi gov’t needed more time to build its economic base in order to be able to support its military and police forces. Now we are seeing the result of this wrong decision-making process.