McClatchy Newspapers is reporting some hard truth about Iraq this morning – or at least part of it.

WASHINGTON - 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.

No change has been announced, and a Pentagon spokesman, Col. Gary Keck, said training Iraqis remains important. "We are just adding another leg to our mission," Keck said, referring to the greater U.S. role in establishing security that new troops arriving in Iraq will undertake.

The reversion from the 2004 happy-face-forward confidence to the 2007 reality-challenged pretense indicates the shifting to the next phase of justification for US troops to remain in Iraq.

Let’s see if we can quickly review and pinpoint the progression: the original March 2003 invasion and conquest led automatically to the occupation. The world watched with horror as one of its oldest civilizations looted in a spasm of revenge public hysteria but there was calm in one quarter. The key point of this phase was highlighted by the fact that the only facility in the country considered worth protecting and preserving was the Oil Ministry, with its incalculably valuable maps of the oil fields. Some still remember Mr Bu$h’s invasion announcement to Iraqis that the US Army was coming, asking them to lay down their arms, welcome the American troops, and under no circumstances blow up or destroy any of the oil production facilities.

As elation over the removal of Saddam Hussein swept through the country American troops did in fact see the rhetorical equivalent of flowers and candy. (“Democracy, whiskey, sexy.”) By April 2003 Iraqis had decided it was time for us to leave, and public demonstrations and marches in Fallujah, for instance, were met with gunfire on several occasions.

We entered a phase of attempting to rebuild all the infrastructure we had destroyed during the “shock and awe” phase of ruthless bombing. There were great fortunes made as Bechtel, CACI, and especially HalliCheneyBurton snapped up no-bid contracts. It was during this phase that GEN Petraeus, then CG of the 101st Airborne Division, made his name as he actually spent discretionary funds employing Iraqis to do reconstruction work.

By 2004 the resistance had begun. Unsecured storage bunkers were looted of their contents, military explosives and weapons. The Al Qa'qaa bunker is the most well-known, as more than 300 tons of military-grade explosives went into the wind, perhaps because there were not enough troops to secure them.

The bombings began.

By 2005 we began to hear about training the Iraqi Army and national police so that they could “stand up.” Month by month, the blood toll increased, devouring Iraqis and Americans as a horrified world looked on, and our allies began to melt away.

Today there are more than 400,000 Iraqis trained to serve in the Army, and more than 175,000 trained for the police. All our allies have left Iraq, save the UK, which two days ago handed control of Maysan Province back to the Iraqis. It now holds only Basra Province, the key to the Persian Gulf, through which oil is shipped. There is an oil production law pending in the Iraqi Parliament, drafted in English by some unknown persons in Washington. It amounts to a diktat as it assigns 75-80% of the oil profits to several Western oil companies, basically until the oil runs out.

Since the Iraqis, apparently fully trained, can seemingly “stand up” we suddenly find the mission of our forces has changed to “security.” The fully-trained Iraqi Army is suddenly not up to the job, and US forces will have to remain until the insurgents are defeated, and the country pacified.

Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who's in charge of training Iraqi troops, said in February that he hoped that Iraqi troops would be able to lead by December. "At the tactical level, I do believe by the end of the year, the conditions should be set that they are increasingly taking responsibility for the combat operations," Dempsey told NBC News.

Maj. Gen. Doug Lute, the director of operations at U.S. Central Command, which oversees military activities in the Middle East, said that during the troop increase, U.S. officers will be trying to determine how ready Iraqi forces are to assume control.

"We are looking for indicators where we can assess the extent to which we are fighting alongside Iraqi security forces, not as a replacement to them," he said. Those signs will include "things like the number of U.S.-only missions, the number of combined U.S.-Iraqi missions, the number where Iraqis are in the lead, the number of Joint Security Stations set up," he said.

That's a far cry from the optimistic assessments U.S. commanders offered throughout 2006 about the impact of training Iraqis.

Many officials are vague about when the U.S. will know when troops can begin to return home. Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the U.S. is trying to buy "time for the Iraqi government to provide the good governance and the economic activity that's required."

There is a pretty clear date when this will happen, although it is a bit provisional because no one knows exactly when the oil will run out.