First, there is this:
In Sadr City, a police officer said those injured in gunbattles Tuesday included three women and three children. Sadr City is a stronghold of the Mahdi Army militia of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. It is also home to an estimated 2.5 million Shiites.
The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said sporadic shooting was still going on and it was too dangerous to venture out on the streets.
It's almost as if we have toddler- and women-homing missiles the way our press reports it. It is routine for Iraqis sympathetic to or afraid of our enemies to make these claims after we kill their fighters in action. Our press just passes along these claims with no effort to confirm them.
Second:
The New York Times reported that an 80-strong company of Iraqi soldiers abandoned their positions Tuesday night in Sadr City, leaving a crucial stretch of road undefended for hours despite pleas by American soldiers in the area for them to stay. ...
Lt. Col. Steve Stover, a military spokesman in Baghdad, called it "a snapshot of one area where U.S. soldiers are in close support of their Iraqi counterparts" and stressed that it is a new army and Iraqi soldiers and national police are taking casualties daily in fighting in other areas.
"This is one company-sized unit, part of a recently formed Iraqi army battalion," Stover said, adding that 65 other Iraqi battalions were operating in Baghdad with "varying degrees of experience and capability."
This failure of a company and the recent failure of the army battalion in Basra from the new 14th division seems to indicate a real problem in the Iraqi military. Oh, not the defections and failures to fight. That's all a part of war. Thirty thousand Iraqi troops broke and ran in 1982 when they tried to defend Khorramshahr from an Iranian counter-offensive. Let's not even speak of how the Iraqi army reacted in 1991 or 2003.
What is notable is what can be inferred from the fact that these new units were thrust into combat even though there are plenty of Iraqi units more seasoned who could have carried out the missions. This seems to show an inability to shift units either because of command inability or logistics failings. Instead of putting new units in quieter areas and using those existing units in Basra or Sadr City where the Iraqis were moving into new territory, the Iraqis just put the newly formed units into the new areas of operation.
Finally:
The ferocity of the Shiite militia response to the government crackdown has surprised Iraqi security forces — which are dominated by Shiites — raising doubts about whether the Iraqis could handle an all-out war without U.S. help.
Well, duh. First of all, the Sadr militias are more formidable because Iran supports them and sends their own people in to lead some of them and fight with them. Yet that still hasn't prevented the Iraqis from defeating them.
Second, obviously the Iraqis can't handle an all-out war without our help. That's been the plan all along. By putting Iraqi infantry into battle we allow them to take over from our troops in many areas. We focused on creating frontline Iraqi infantry and police units--which we have done--while we supply the naval power, air power, and combat support and combat service support for the Iraqi line infantry units even as we train Iraqis to take over these more difficult technical roles. It is not a sign of failure for the Iraqis that we do jobs they are not yet equipped to do.
A target-rich article, to be sure, with the only useful bit of information one I had to deduce from the reporting.
