Mistakes?

Mistakes?... I've made a few.... heh, no, just kidding:

"There are all sorts of day-to-day issues where I say to myself, oh, I didn't say that right, or I didn't explain this clearly enough," Obama said, "or maybe if I had sequenced this plan first as opposed to that one, maybe it would have gotten done quicker."

But the president mentioned no actual mistakes.

Of course he didn't. Why should he? His biggest mistakes don't even get reported as such. I can offer up several on the national security front, but here are just two mistakes that you've seen hints of lately in the news.

The first actually was made in his earliest days in the White House. (But we're paying the price for it now, and will for years to come.) At around the same time he was taking the oath of office, the soldiers of the 5th Stryker Brigade Combat Team were completing preparations for their upcoming Iraq tour:

Like previous Stryker brigades, the 5th Brigade has put dozens of its troops through intensive, 10-month Arabic language training. They were tested in exercises last month where they had to help their commanders negotiate with native-speaker role players at Fort Lewis' urban training center, Leschi Town.

Tunnell has added his own adaptations as well. He sent senior sergeants to intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., so that each of his infantry companies could do more analysis work that would typically be done at the battalion level, further up the chain of command.

And to give his companies more know-how when it comes to bargaining with the mukhtars and sheiks they'll encounter in Iraq, he sent senior sergeants for training in the art of negotiation.

All that was soon tossed out the window for this headline: "Barack Obama diverts 17,000 soldiers from Iraq to Afghanistan."

Mr Obama indicated that the units being sent to Afghanistan had been earmarked for Iraq, saying the drawdown of US forces there "allows us the flexibility to increase our presence in Afghanistan".

Which is a great headline for a guy who campaigned on exactly that; at the time it was widely reported and wildly popular. For the 5th SBCT it was a tough break - but also an order you salute smartly and carry on. That would be all well and good, but a few days later came the second part of the deal that didn't get any attention at all.

Gen. Odierno will receive a Stryker Brigade to replace the incoming replacement brigade diverted to Afghanistan just a week ago. That means that he will continue to maintain the current level of two Stryker brigades in Iraq.

A Fort Lewis Stryker combat brigade will deploy to Iraq this fall, several months ahead of the original schedule, Army officials said Monday.

When the 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division departs, all three Stryker brigades based at the Army post will be simultaneously deployed to combat for the first time. Each brigade has about 4,000 soldiers.

It's terrible that so many brigades had to deploy, but since they did wouldn't it make more sense to send the 4th to Afghanistan, and the 5th - the one that had trained for Iraq - to Iraq? In fact, wouldn't making that switch be courting disaster? That depends on your goal (and how sure you are of the media's willingness to play along) - if it's to win wars, then yes, it's a mistake to switch them like that. If it's to make Americans think you're drawing down troops in Iraq to send to Afghanistan, then no. And if the media's on your side, you are mistake-proof.

So get 'er done, soldier.

They may not have had enough time to learn the language or prepare properly for Afghanistan, but when confronted with "an absence of good intelligence on what they would be facing in the Arghandab" valley, NCOs in the unit found a way to improvise, adapt and overcome, by "printing out information on the Arghandab region from The Long War Journal, a respected non-Defense Department Web site, and posting it on bulletin boards."

As good as my friend Bill Roggio's site is, I don't think that's its intended purpose. To recap: the 2nd Infantry Division's (2ID) 5th Stryker Brigade Combat Team (5/2 SBCT), a brigade that had trained and prepared for Iraq, was re-routed to Afghanistan - a widely heralded and highly praised move. But also a fraud perpetrated on the American public, because in an "overlooked" story another 2ID brigade (4/2 SBCT) was sent to Iraq in their place.

Hey, what could possibly go wrong?

Both left for their respective tours at approximately the same time from the same place. Let's move forward to revisit the 4th and 5th SBCT in the middle of those tours - at the end of that calendar year :

End of year update: Where are they now?

The 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division is operating in Iraq.

The 5th is in Afghanistan:

...The battalion had spent much of the previous two years training for combat, but preparing for the wrong theater -- until February, when it got orders for Afghanistan, 1-17 was scheduled to deploy to Iraq.

However, 1-17 soldiers said their training, which had been focused on highly "kinetic" urban warfare drills such as room clearing, did not change much to accommodate the change in mission. "The COIN-intensive fight here ... isn't so much what we trained on," said 1st Lt. Kevin Turnblom, Charlie Company's fire support officer.

"We trained [in] urban fighting in Iraq and then they give us Afghanistan," said Staff Sgt. Jason Hughes, Weapons Squad leader in 1st Platoon, Charlie Company. "The principles are the same but the details are day-and-night different, and we've learned that the hard way over the last almost five months."

How bad was it? Read the whole Army Times report here. (And realize it isn't everything there was to tell.) It's a disaster that ends like this:

But the final blow to the company's morale was still to come: the new RC-South commander British Maj. Gen. Nick Carter chose to pull Charlie Company and the rest of 1-17 out of the Arghandab permanently and replace them with elements of the 82nd Airborne Division's 4th Brigade.

If you read the story you realize (regardless of why he said he did it) he had no other choice. That's doubly infuriating because 4/82 had originally been sent to Afghanistan as part of President Obama's initial surge specifically for the mission of training Afghan troops - something that would allow the draw down (now scheduled to "begin in July 2011") there, too.

But while the Times story ended, 5/2's Afghan tour didn't. So, did all those early failures contribute to further morale and discipline problems in 5/2, or did they hold their heads up, recover, and soldier on? No doubt most of the brigade's soldiers did the latter to the best of their abilities, but - get ready for another shocker here - by early 2010 other members of the brigade had formed the now-legendary "Kill Team" you my have read about elsewhere recently.

The story is actually a year old...

The military issued a brief statement last week saying a criminal probe was under way into the allegations of killing, illegal drug use, assault and conspiracy. One military official familiar with the details of the case told CNN the matter was brought to the attention of commanders by at least one other soldier. The killings of the three civilians did not take place in one single incident, the official said.
<...>
A senior U.S. Army official directly familiar with Stryker operations said the command of the 5-2 has been a concern to the Army for months.

...but it didn't really "catch on" until the actual pictures were obtained this year, by a German news source. (And later in Rolling Stone; speaking of which, another part of the reason that story didn't really "take off" back in June, 2010 was because before the month was over, General McChrystal had resigned after a Rolling Stone magazine article hurt Joe Biden's feewings.) Still, the AP tried to find an angle that would make it a "big" story when first reported back in June:

A U.S. Army soldier who's been charged with murdering three Afghan civilians appears to have crossed paths with the family of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin....

Wasilla, as Palin frequently pointed out during the 2008 election campaign, is a very small community, so it's not surprising that the Palin family would have developed relationships, however incidental, with one of its residents. According to a 2009 People magazine profile of Bristol Palin, Jeremy Morlock's sister April is a friend of Bristol's and attended a "pizza and bingo party" at the Palin residence.

"His unit has done an admirable job in Afghanistan. They've been an important part of the fight there, and I don't think we can transfer this soldier's actions as a reflection. In the general population, a certain part of it is criminal. That happens in the Army sometimes, too," Parker said.

But Parker said the Army is a "learning organization" that would, if necessary, make changes to its screening of soldiers sent to combat zones.

Partial truth, at least. But while colonels can bust privates, and generals can bust colonels, and the AP can assault Sarah Palin (relentlessly), none of them (except news reporters) can bust the Commander in Chief; they're not going to tell you the whole thing started with a quest for a fraudulent headline: Barack Obama diverts 17,000 soldiers from Iraq to Afghanistan.

Speaking of which, let's turn back to the 4th SBCT - the unit he sent to Iraq. While those soldiers had to sacrifice time at home in order to deploy ahead of their previous schedule, that hurry-up also meant they couldn't complete the training then given to all Brigade Combat Teams heading for Iraq so that they could be called "Advise and Assist Brigades" - which is what makes "non-combat" brigade combat teams "non-combat." So they deployed as a "combat brigade."

Guess who made lemonade out of that. By the end of the summer of 2010 their combat tour was coming to an end - and what an end it would be:

No doubt there's something else on TV now - but last week I caught a bit of the coverage of "the last American combat brigade leaving Iraq." I wonder if this marks the series finale for this particular program - one that's only been broadcast sporadically since 2007 anyway.

Here's a very brief clip:

The Pentagon is letting NBC make the announcement for them... I'm not sure if that line of dialog adds or subtracts to the degree of realism they've been able to inject in this program...

...the White House wants to find a way to mark the moment and remind voters just two months before midterm elections that he delivered on his vow to pull out combat forces. Mr. Obama plans to make a high-profile speech on the drawdown next week, and aides are discussing whether to have him meet with returning troops. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will address the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Indianapolis on Monday.

Following his speech on the topic earlier this month the New York Times reported that "Mr. Obama has adopted Iraq as a relative success story, and aides said he and other administration officials would hold several events in August to honor returning soldiers and promote the drawdown." More:

The notion that Iraq would be the political selling point while the "good war" in Afghanistan is now the sour note underscores how much has changed since Mr. Obama began his presidential campaign.

Well, "change" was a campaign pledge too, wasn't it? In reality, the Iraq drawdown was continuing as scheduled during the Bush administration. But yep - since they didn't get their "advise and assist training" the 4th Strykers got to play the part of "the last COMBAT unit to leave Iraq" on TV. And since NBC got the official "ride-along" even Rachel Maddow made the trip ("I'm totally covered in goose bumps," she declared. "It is an important moment.") to cover the historic moment when Barack Obama once again "made good" on his campaign pledge to withdraw troops from Iraq - using as a prop the unit that, if the original story of Obama drawing down troops in Iraq had been true, would not have been there in the first place.

Fortunately, the brigade completed its combat tour without any combat deaths. Unfortunately, on the very day they had handed over their last combat outpost to the Iraqi army (but less widely reported), Spc. Faith R. Hinkley, also from Ft Lewis but serving in one of the non-combat brigades, was killed in combat elsewhere in Iraq.

So - there you have it. "There are all sorts of day-to-day issues where I say to myself, oh, I didn't say that right, or I didn't explain this clearly enough," Obama said, "or maybe if I had sequenced this plan first as opposed to that one, maybe it would have gotten done quicker." So yeah, lots of little things. As for the big things, well, if you never see 'em on TV, they really aren't "mistakes" at all, are they?

But that's rather a dramatic change to make without explanation, don't you think? The original version indicates the entire narrative of diverting troops from Iraq to Afghanistan is a fraud perpetrated on the American public. The later version is hardly newsworthy.

Aren't corrections of that magnitude worthy of an appended explanation?

It's been a week since that was sent and I've received no reply.

And I still haven't.

Meanwhile, in more recent news: "Senior U.S. and Iraqi military officials have been in negotiations about keeping some 10,000 American troops in Iraq beyond the scheduled withdrawal of all U.S. forces at year's end..." but the Iraqis are worried we'll turn their country into another Libya. But maybe Obama will eventually change Bush's withdrawal timeline after all.

But I promised "two mistakes that you've seen hints of lately in the news," and that's just one (even if just one of many ways we've tried to lose that war) - though it's a big one. The second is, too, but it's about a more recent war - and this has gone on long enough, so that little story will have to come a little later. (Assuming the world doesn't blow up before then.)

Until then, here's a question to ponder while you enjoy your universal health care, America: what mistakes have you made lately?