By allowing Iraq's new military to be organized largely along ethnic and religious lines, the United States may inadvertently be deepening the divisions among the country's Kurdish north, Shiite Muslim south and Sunni Muslim Arab west and leaving the sects to fight over the heart of the country. The creation of a national army to help unify and pacify Iraq is key to U.S. plans to begin significant withdrawals of American troops from Iraq in 2006, and President Bush and other top officials frequently cite the growing number of trained Iraqi troops as evidence of progress. Iraqi officials and political leaders, however, said the dominance of Shiite and Kurdish militia members in many Iraqi army units had given Sunni insurgents a broader base of support and turned more Sunnis against the U.S. effort in Iraq.
The perception that different army units are tools of Shiite or Kurdish ambitions has been reinforced during the past two years as U.S. troops conducting offensives in western Iraq and in Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad teamed up with Iraqi soldiers and Interior Ministry police commandos who were mostly Shiites or Kurds.
There's also concern over reports of "death squads" acting illegally, rounding up suspected Sunni insurgents and summarily executing them:
Badr also has infiltrated the intelligence sections of the Interior Ministry and many of its police commando units in Baghdad, where Sunni groups have documented dozens of cases in which uniformed men have raided Sunni neighborhoods and detained men who've later been found dead.
What can be done about these militias?
Earlier in December, a senior U.S. military officer in Baghdad said dismantling the militias wouldn't be easy and that doing it would be up to the Iraqi government.
"The question is how do they disband this organization," said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. "There's the exact same danger with precipitously disbanding them like we did the Iraqi army ... where will they all go? What will they do when you take their jobs from them?"
Though the decision by Bremer and the CPA to disband the Iraqi army in 2003 has been criticized ad nauseum for the past 2 1/2 years, it's hard to overstate it's consequences. Though retaining the Iraq army would never have been as simple as some critics of the decision think it would've been, there's no question that it created a power vacuum where there had once been an army, and the need to fill that vacuum with something became only more urgent throughout 2004 and 2005. Doing has led directly to short-cuts like incorporating Shiite and Kurdish militias directly into the security forces, which has predictably only furthered the divide between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds.
3 comments:
Yeah, it was obviously a bad idea to disband the Iraqi army and then a worse idea to incorporate local militias into the new military. There's no way this job would ever have been easy, but reinforcing ethnic divisions and then giving each faction its own trained army is definitely not the way to peace. Even if such units weren't prone to partisan violence, people of other factions wouldn't trust them, and of course they are prone to using their power against enemy factions.
I think we can look to Lebanon as a previous example where a multi-ethnic army broke down and became the military arms of varying groups. If there's any hope of saving Iraq we have to make sure that doesn't happen.
The comparison to Lebanon is a good one. This has already been said, but clearly the decision to disband the army was the result of the over-optimistic thinking of the first few months of the occupation. Clearly had Bremer and others known how tough the insurgency would become, they would have thought twice about getting rid of the core of an army they could've used, putting themselves in a position to have little choice but to sign up whoever wanted to join...including Shiite and Kurdish militias. Or, maybe I'm giving them too much credit and they would've done it anyway...who knows?
Well I think at the very least they were looking at the situation without really looking at the way Iraq worked. They just didn't think that the Iraqi people would actually need such a strong centralized state to maintain order. They thought we could lop off the government and go right into elections, never mind that the Iraqis don't have the infrastructure to run the country without a strong central government. I mean, the difference between Iraq and the US on that count is clear: if our federal government was disrupted, at the very least we have strong state and local governments to keep things running until we had it going again. That's not how Iraq worked. It was a very centralized state and without Saddam leading it, it the country's infrastructure was broken.
It's kind of arrogance to walk in and assume that because all people desire freedom, they'll naturally do things the way America does.
Post a Comment