http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...4-2553148.html

America’s refusal to give Baghdad’s security forces sufficient guns and equipment has cost a great number of lives, the Iraqi Prime Minister said yesterday

Nouri al-Maliki said the insurgency had been bloodier and prolonged because Washington had refused to part with equipment. If it released the necessary arms, US forces could “dramatically" cut their numbers in three to six months, he told The Times.

Asked how long Iraq would require US troops, Mr al-Maliki said: “If we succeed in implementing the agreement between us to speed up the equipping and providing weapons to our military forces, I think that within three to six months our need for American troops will dramatically go down. That is on condition that there are real, strong efforts to support our military forces and equipping and arming them.”

I think there is a very realistic possibility over the next 6 months that the US government is going to arm the Iraqi army and police forces with tons of modern weaponry and equipment and eventually those weapons will be used to kill American soldiers.

I think most of the weaponry used by the combatants in Iraq have been supplied by the good ol' USA . Iraq was awash with arms before we invaded/occupied it and after failing to secure the thousands of ordinance depots throughout the land, we continued to bring in fresh weapons for our boys and girls.
In short... American arms are what they're using to kill us with now.

The government needs to have power, that is how they will stay in power. We NEED the democratically elected government to stay in power, to prevent a fundamentalist regime from taking over and all the bad things that the president says he is preventing from happening from happening. Nobody wants Iraq to turn into a taliban like terrorist supporting state. The way to prevent that is for the constitutional democracy government in power to prevail.

How do we keep the current government in power?

Bush says we put in more troops and prop it up with US power. That is totally wrong.

What we need to do is show the Iraqi people that their government is autonomous to the USA. The Iraqi people do not like us. The fact that most of them justify attacks on America is evidence of this. The presence of US troops is disruptive, even caustic to support of the current government by the people of Iraq. We need to withdraw and let the current government stand up. When it becomes clear that the current government can stand on it's own and will not fall because of car bombs, the the reasons for bombings will stop and the bombs will stop.

To do this, we need to get out, but support the current government as much as possible with arms, intelligence, and training of Iraqi special forces to be held outside of Iraq.

That's probably the most sensible thing I have ever read of your posts regarding Iraq. What you said is probably going to happen, though the surge will help clear the rats nest and really indicate if the Iraqis are serious about their autonomy.

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Cheney is the second executive officer to shoot someone in the face and chest. Clinton was the first.

What a novel idea...give the Iraqi Army the guns they need to fight the insurgents themselves. Then we don't need American troops to carry guns and get killed.

I am no expert in military strategy, but it kind of has me wondering why somebody didn't think about this - or at least mention it - sometime in the past 4 years. Why has this light bulb suddenly turned on all of a sudden just recently? Oh, that's right, now I remember. The last time we gave Iraqis guns, the insurgents used them to make life miserable for the soldiers who came to their country to liberate them.

Pity the 3000 young soldiers who have died in Iraq for a cause where the US government didn't trust the locals enough to give them guns to help fight their own war.

Since the President revealed our strategy on TV telling exactly how we are going to use 20,000 extra troops, you don't really think the rats are going to be so foolish to hang around in their same old nests and wait to be killed? From what I have observed, both rats and insurgents are clever enough to figure out how to get out of harms way before the bullets start to fly.

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Hobo
Charter member of 'Republicans Who Hate Bush" Club

The problem is that we don't trust that the weapons won't end up in the hands of Shiite militias, death squads, on the black market or even in the insurgency.

I'm sure Iran would love to get its hands on some of the latest American military technology, courtesy of their friends in the Iraqi government.

It's a Catch-22, but a serious one.

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Man up.

Seems there has already been an agreement made to provide these weapons. What's the holdup?

Wonder if there would be a need for an escalation if these weapons had already been provided as promised? Shouldn't there have been a concerted effort to withdraw a proportionate number of American troops for every Iraqi Army brigade supplied with weapons?

A fear that they will end up in the hands of militias? Where was that fear when warehouses full of weapons were raided over the past 4 years we've been in Iraq?

Question: what happened to all the Iraq armoury? What happened to its airplanes, helicopters, tanks armour-vehicles, artillery, machine guns and all the munitions etc etc. Not all of it was destroyed in the invasion - probably not even a significant part of it. So what happened to it? Did a few 'friendly' arms dealers get the lot to sell off elsewhere?

I don't think anyone is talking about Stealth fighters, cruise missles and M1 tanks. Just equiping the police and military with lots of M16's and stuff like that. Maybe some Bradly's, that is about it. Maybe sell them some F-16's if they need an airstrike or basic helicopters. If they need more than that, we can do a smart bomb strike for them from a carrier.

If the government can't control the stuff, then they will never be able to run the country. Sure, a few police and soldiers will use theirs as part of the militias they also belong to. But if the government can't have weapons, how can they ever hope to fight insurgants, militias and other criminals.

Elections do not make a democracy. The iraqi election was like a census, and the shiite radicals won.

The iraqi government is made up of shiite sectarian militias, you will never convince them to fight the shiite sectarian militias. Progress will be made in fighting sunni insurgents and sunni terrorists, but the iraqi government will make no progress fighting the shiite militas.

the problem with the iraqi army isn't training and it isn't weapons, it's loyalty.

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"The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind--surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false" - 1984

What I recall is them wanting tanks and artillery, as well as helicopters and other armored vehicles. The latter are reasonable requests; the former not so much.

That's the conundrum. But I wouldn't give heavy weapons to a militia-riddled government. Kick out the militias, and then we'll talk.

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Man up.