News reports fingering Iraqi soldiers in the 2004 shooting deaths of two California National Guardsmen have again raised the perennial issues: How reliable are Iraqi forces? And when can U.S. and British militaries fully turn over security in Iraq to native troops?
The answers, it seems, are "not very" and "not soon" -- with qualifiers.
"Restoring Iraq to military self-sufficiency will require at least a decade," says John Pike, a military expert at the think tank Globalsecurity.org. "For that reason alone, Iraq will remain an American protectorate well into the next decade ... [and] I would not expect to see a significant drawdown [of U.S. troops] prior to 2007."
Read my full report at Military.com. Check out an Iraqi forces photo gallery at Flickr. And see my graphic novel WAR FIX for real-life scenes from Iraq's dangerous streets.
-- David Axe
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