This Does Not Inspire Much Confidence

Here is some evidence that Petraeus' appointment and the "surge" is not much more than an ad hoc fuck-up in the works.

Army Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new top U.S. commander in Iraq, told Congress that he might supplement efforts to secure Baghdad using the Iraqi Facilities Protection Service, a 150,000-man force that guards Iraqi government agencies. But that service is widely considered unreliable, and elements were described in July by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as "more dangerous than the militias," according to Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.).

"The prime minister said he wanted to get rid of the FPS as fast as possible," Reed said this week, recalling his meeting with Maliki in Baghdad last summer. There are "bad elements" in FPS units that "are carrying out murders and kidnappings . . . [and] attacking the infrastructure that they are supposedly protecting," Reed said in his trip report about what Maliki had told him. "Because of the FPS," Reed wrote, Maliki said that "some governmental ministries' guards are more dangerous than the militias." ...

The Iraq Study Group described FPS members as having "questionable loyalties and capabilities." It quoted an unnamed senior U.S. official as saying that they are "incompetent, dysfunctional and subversive," with some serving the manpower needs of sectarian party militias and death squads.

The willingness of Gen. Petraeus last week to agree with Sen. Lieberman's outrageous allegation that skepticism by lawmakers of the "surge" emboldens the enemy portrays a commander who is willing to say anything to further what is looking like a hastily concieved mission.

And Sen. Hagel is claiming that there is no written plan for Bush's "surge."

This FPS business only confirms such suspicions that the "change in strategy" [sic] is little more than a hodge-podge of ideas that sound good to various officials, but will not fit together worth a shit.