So much for those Iraqi security forces

Once again, the truth threatens to undermine President Bush's grotesque attempts to spin the Iraq War in the direction of his peculiarly faith-based sense of reality.

For it looks like those Iraqi security forces in whom we have been told to trust, those wonderfully well-trained forces who will take over for the U.S. when Bush withdraws American forces for partisan political purposes and shifts the war in a new and as yet ill-defined direction.

From the AP, via Editor & Publisher:

The training of Iraqi security forces has suffered a big "setback" in the last six months, with the army and other forces being increasingly used to settle scores and make other political gains, Iraqi Vice President Ghazi al-Yawer said Monday.

Al-Yawer disputed contentions by U.S. officials, including President Bush, that the training of security forces was gathering speed, resulting in more professional troops.

Bush has said the United States will not pull out of Iraq until Iraq's own forces can maintain security. In a speech last week, he said Iraqi forces are becoming increasingly capable of securing the country.

Al-Yawer, a Sunni moderate, said he agreed the United States cannot pull out now because "there will be a huge vacuum," leaving Iraq in danger of falling into civil war. In particular, armed Shiite militias in the south might try to incite war if U.S.-led coalition forces leave, he said in an interview with The Associated Press and a U.S. newspaper at a conference [in Dubai].

Yes, I know the political angle: Al-Yawer is a Sunni. Obviously, he wouldn't want the U.S. to withdraw and to turn over security responsibility to Shiites, not with all the talk of torture at Iraqi detention facilities and Shiite militias terrorizing Sunnis. Plus, Iraq is in pre-election mode. Surely al-Yawer is motivated by personal political aspirations.

But shouldn't his claim be taken seriously? After all, he's not the only one who's questioned the competence of these much-ballyhooed Iraqi security forces -- see James Fallows in the latest Atlantic Monthly, for example. Bush has said that he wants to finish the job and that it would be irresponsible to withdraw U.S. forces prematurely and/or according to a timetable, but his hopes for a successful union of his key personal and political interests rest largely on the viability of these security forces to take over a large chunk of the policing on the ground.

Are they up to the task? Not if al-Yawer is to be believed.

And, unfortunately, there is good reason to believe him -- at least in part and at least to the point where Bush's hopes seem irresponsibly optimistic at best.

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For more, see Matthew Yglesias at TAPPED and Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice.