36 Countries?

From Josh Marshall at TPM:

There was so much crap in the president's speech last night that analyzing requires a fairly aggressive form of crap triage to distinguish the merely bogus from the bogus and hilarious or the bogus and unconscionable. So let me focus in again on the president's reference to the "the 36 nations who have troops on the ground in Iraq."

One way the president comes up with this number is to rope in something called the NATO Training Mission-Iraq (NTM-1).

As Spencer Ackerman notes here, most of the countries involved in this initiative have agreed to let Iraqis come to their countries for training, not the other way around. So for instance, according to a recent Congressional Research Service report, Spain "plans to train groups of 25 Iraqis in mine clearance at a center outside Madrid."

And who has boots on the ground in country? One example from the president's list of 36 is Iceland which has sent a single public information officer to serve in the NATO mission in Baghdad. More robustly, Italy has 8 officers on the NTM-I mission in Baghdad, Portugal is considering sending "up to 10."

What really makes this funny, but not in a ha-ha sort of way, is that the lone Icelandic soldier mentioned is going home next month! There goes any claim to 36...

Foreign Minister Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir has decided to remove an Icelandic Crisis Response Unit (ICRU) member from a NATO training program for the Iraqi army in Baghdad next month, causing disappointment among NATO leaders.

The ICRU member has been working in Baghdad for the last two years, primarily as a media representative, and will cease working there October 1, Morgunbladid reports.

Marshall also has a pretty good recap of the entire speech that is worth reading.

14 September 2007