It Takes Time to Train an Army to Kick Your Ass

Having just returned from hasty and yet rewarding research at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (the SECOND-best college in Charlotte), this little nugget from Democratic Underground's Top Ten Conservative Idiots caught my eye:

"In order to "catapult the propaganda," Bush has been tossing out the fantasy that "Right now there are over 80 army battalions fighting alongside coalition troops," with "over 30 Iraqi battalions in the lead."


There are about 500-600 soldiers in a battalion, so that's a minimum of 15,000 Iraqi soldiers ready to rock n' roll. Considering that there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, that means we only have to train 135,000 more Iraqis (at a cost of $7 billion per month) to finish the job. It took us two years to train 15,000 so it should only take another, oh, 15-20 years or so to train the rest.

There's just one problem - when Bush says that there are 30-80 Iraqi battalions fighting in Iraq, he's talking out of his ass. Last week Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. general in Iraq, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that there is actually only one self-sufficient Iraqi battalion."

So, at $200 billion over two years to train one battalion, it will only take us (fun! math time!) 60 years and 6 trillion dollars to train 30 battalions and only 160 years and 16 trillion dollars to train 80 battalions! Super!

Of course, that's assuming there are no more setbacks, the WMDs are found, Saddam confesses to hiring Bin Laden, monkeys fly, Cheney avoids indictment, and the Democrats take back the Senate.