OCCOM BILL wrote: Brandon; I've never seen anyone so diligently feed a troll before. This guy is the Antonym of LSM
and shame on everyone who doesn't recognize it.
Careful, O'Bill. People have accused Blacksmithn of being of being stupid, ill-informed and a troll before only to be exposed as a fraud themselves.
For instance, there was the time a Republican operative, Just Wonders, was on here lambasting Blacksmithn for saying that the Iraq forces could be discounted as being considered a real force capable of defending the new government of Iraq. She complained, she hollered, she whined, she moaned, and oh yes, she blamed the "liberal" media for not reporting all the times the Iraqi forces engaged the enemy and sent them to rout.
So she was asked to produce some evidence of any times the Iraqi forces had located the enemy-not fired back after being fired upon themselves, but actually went after the enemy-and won a decisive battle. Her answer: go find it yourself if you're so smart. Followed by several posts in the same vein where she argued that actually qualified as a satisfactory answer.
Finally, Timberland came running into to do what he could to rescue his ideological colleague from the hole she had dug for herself. What emerged is a group of official reports where the Iraqi forces had acted like a SWAT team, going to the houses of suspected terrorists leaders in Baghdad and other towns and arresting them. Much of the time there was no armed resistance, sometimes there was a limited amount. In all cases, they were were assisted or backed up by coalition forces.
In other words, three years into their existence, the Iraqi forces were not an army at all, but at best could be termed a police force. When they got a tip about an insurgent leader living at a certain address, they got a whole mess of people, together with coalition forces, and arrested them. Most of these arrests seemed to be in Baghdad.
There were no instances of the Iraqi forces roaming the countryside in vehicles looking for enemy to engage and take out, which is what you expect an army to do. No reconaissance missions to spot the enemy located over a hill, or anything of the sort. That is all for our soldiers and the Brits. The Iraqi forces just man checkpoints and do arrests, backed up by coalition forces in cases where there is actual shooting.
Which means that the Iraqi army really isn't an army at all, in the sense most people understand the word.
Moreover, Bush's request for an additional 20,000 troops is specifically to "secure Baghdad", which they made clear the coalition had never emphasized before. Unspoken, but quite clear, is that the previous plan that the Iraqi forces would perform arrests of insurgents in Baghdad and other towns, freeing the coalition forces to secure the rest of the country, was a failure. The Iraqi army, this far into it's existence, can not even perform the duties of a police SWAT team-that's why Bush is asking for more troops to secure Baghdad.
The fact is that the Iraqi forces were relegated to mere police duty, and now we have admitted they can't perform even THAT, is testament to Blacksmithn's assessment of them as being essentially useless. And what does Just Wonders have to say about this? We don't know. She stopped posting on Election Night 2006 when the Democrats took over the majority in both the House and the Senate.
So if you want to call Blacksmithn a troll, feel free to do so. Just beware that others have tried before to do the same thing and ended up having to leave the forum out of sheer embarassment when they were shown to be wrong.
