Remember, “As Iraqis stand up, we’ll stand down?” Not so much anymore.

Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces. Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said. … Pentagon officials said they know of no new training resources that have been included in U.S. plans to dispatch 28,000 additional troops to Iraq.”

This kind of major Iraq war policy shift is something Secretary of Defense Robert Gates should have mentioned when he was telling us about the extended tours.

This post was written by Mary Mancini