NATO Poised to Announce Return to Iraq for ‘Training Mission

Officials Declared Last Training Mission Complete in 2011

by Jason Ditz, 

Hope springs eternal for NATO officials confident of their ability to create strong militaries in the Western style across the world with training missions, and this week’s NATO summit is expected to unveil their next training target as Iraq.

NATO has plenty of experience training Iraq’s military to a point they are contented with, having left in 2011 after years of training top Iraqi officers, only to watch that Iraqi military collapse in the face of ISIS opposition, with the very same top officers accused of abandoning their posts more or less immediately.

The US and Britain have already sent troops back into Iraq to launch a training operation aimed at “reforming” a military that they’d only just finished creating a few years prior, and are hoping, given how poorly the recent effort is going, that more NATO members would be the solution.

With NATO slowly reducing its presence in Afghanistan, it is only natural they’d be looking for new missions to justify their continued existence, and recent predictions of a Russian invasion haven’t exactly panned out, leaving Iraq the most convenient target.

http://news.antiwar.com/2015/06/23/nato-poised-to-announce-return-to-iraq-for-training-mission/