Mr. SQ, resident ACW graphic analyst, sends along his comment on US strategy in Iraq.
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Steve Clemons has a posted a copy of the US National Strategy for Victory in Iraq. (more from the NYT and WP)
The document tells you a lot more about the prospects for democratic elections in, say, Ohio than Iraq.
Rather than a “strategy,” the document is better described as the usual collection of talking points, some of which are lies—one example is the claim:
As of November 2005, there were more than 212,000 trained and equipped Iraqi Security Forces, compared with 96,000 in September of last year.
Iraq did not, however, have 96,000 trained and equipped Iraqi Security Forces (like the dapper fellows at right) in September 2004.
Adam Entous with Reuters obtained internal Defense Department documents in September 2004 that revealed only 8,169 had completed the full eight-week academy training. 46,176 of what are publicly called “trained and equipped” forces were listed privately as “untrained.”
Trained, untrained. What are you, a semiologist?
One wonders how many of the “212,000 trained and equipped Iraqi Security Forces” are, well, trained or equipped.
The document itself is an offense to the orderly mind, a mish-mash of arrows, bullet points and checkmarks that often violate the convention against “dividing” points into fewer than two subpoints. I ask you: Do paragraphs hate our freedoms?
At ACW, we like our flag draped propaganda over the top, with full paragraphs and lots of pretty pictures. So, I though I would share this brochure that a friend of mine picked up at DOD entitled From Dictatorship to Democracy.
Click on the image for a .pdf file, now with both pages.