Allen Says U.S. Police Have Same Loyalty Problems As Iraqi Security Forces

By Judd Legum on Aug 21, 2005 at 7:28 pm

This morning, the Washington Post reported on severe problems within the Iraqi security forces:

Shiite and Kurdish militias, often operating as part of Iraqi government security forces, have carried out a wave of abductions, assassinations and other acts of intimidation, consolidating their control over territory across northern and southern Iraq and deepening the country’s divide along ethnic and sectarian lines, according to political leaders, families of the victims, human rights activists and Iraqi officials.

While Iraqi representatives wrangle over the drafting of a constitution in Baghdad, the militias, and the Shiite and Kurdish parties that control them, are creating their own institutions of authority, unaccountable to elected governments, the activists and officials said.

On ABC’s This Week, George Stephanopoulos asked Sen. George Allen (R-VA) about the article. Allen said we have the same problems in the United States:

STEPHANOPOULOS: We read on the front page of the Washington Post this morning that these elements of the Iraqi military, the army and security forces we’re training up, are actually, many of them, still loyal to their parties, still loyal to their militias and it’s not a national army.

ALLEN: Well, that’s true. And you have that even in our United States. We have local police; we have state police, and you have the FBI…

It seems Allen is willing to saying anything to avoid admitting there are problems in Iraq.

UPDATE: Once again, Crooks and Liars provides the video.

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Security

Hagel: The Longer We Stay, The More Problems We Are Going To Have

By Judd Legum on Aug 21, 2005 at 10:35 am

This morning on ABC’s This Week, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) explains the problems with Bush’s policies in Iraq:

Stay the course is not a policy. Part of the problem that we have as Henry Kissinger pointed out here in the last few days in an op-ed in The Washington Post is we have no measurement for progress, for success.

And so I think by any standard when you analyze two and a half years in Iraq where we have put in over a third of a trillion dollars, where we have lost over 1,900

Americans, over 14,000 wounded. Electricity production down, oil production down.

Any measurement, any standard you apply to this, we’re not winning.

Hagel also explains why we need a fundamental shift in our policy:

The reason that I don’t think more troops is the answer now is we’re past that stage now because now we are locked into a bogged down problem, not unsimilar, dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam.

The longer we stay, the more problems we’re going to have, the more occupying force dynamics flow into this, the more influence of the outside people, as well as the inside people are going to hurt this country.

Looks like the wheels are coming off.

UPDATE: Crooks and Liars has the video.