Yet another much-trumpeted key ingredient of our secret plan for success that the rocket scientists and brain surgeons tasked with running the war on Iraq have quietly backed away from:

Military planners have abandoned the idea that standing up Iraqi troops will enable American soldiers to start coming home soon and now believe that U.S. troops will have to defeat the insurgents and secure control of troubled provinces.

Training Iraqi troops, which had been the cornerstone of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy since 2005, has dropped in priority, officials in Baghdad and Washington said.
[...]
…evidence has been building for months that training Iraqi troops is no longer the focus of U.S. policy. Pentagon officials said they know of no new training resources that have been included in U.S. plans to dispatch 28,000 additional troops to Iraq. The officials spoke only on the condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to discuss the policy shift publicly.
[...]
President Bush first announced the training strategy in the summer of 2005.

“Our strategy can be summed up this way,” Bush said. “As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.”

If I had a dollar for every time a proud and loyal American has heard President Bush repeat that phrase since then, I would be in a position to make a substantial dent in the budget deficit. However, that will probably not stop George Bush and Dick Cheney and Dana Perino from explaining to us how standing up when they stand down was never our policy, tactic or strategy.

(Of course, we always knew that. Everything these guys say is just rhetoric. Everything. Always.)