Liberal Talk Radio

Bing and Owen West’s Slate piece on refocusing our role in Iraq is interesting enough: they want to go back to being “advisors” for the Iraqi army, which I think is something we tried in the great surge of 2004, or maybe the great forward together plan of 2005. Or was that “Forward Together II of early-mid 2005?” It’s easy to get confused.

The problem is I have no idea who we’d be advising or why, and the piece doesn’t attempt to answer that question. We’re just supposed to advise the Iraqi army to make it a better army, but in service of what? Stuff like this makes me think that we’re just working towards building up a Shiite army to be strong enough that it can sponsor a military coup, at which point we leave.