The Iraqi Army Will Never Be Ready
by James Buchanan
Apparently Bush’s eternity campaign in Iraq does not go over well in Europe. An Associated Press article reports “Bulgaria and Ukraine will begin withdrawing their combined 1,250 troops by mid-December. If Australia, Britain, Italy, Japan, Poland and South Korea reduce or recall their personnel, more than half of the non-American forces in Iraq could be gone by next summer. Japan and South Korea help with reconstruction, but Britain and Australia provide substantial support forces and Italy and Poland train Iraqi troops and police. Their exodus would deal a blow to American efforts to prepare Iraqis to take over the most dangerous peacekeeping tasks and craft an eventual U.S. exit strategy… (The number of Allies remaining in Iraq) is now just under 24,000 mostly non-combat personnel from 27 countries. The coalition has steadily unraveled as the death toll rises and angry publics clamor for troops to leave.” The United States has 161,000 troops in Iraq accounting for almost ninety percent of the occupation force.
It’s hardly a secret that most of our allies in Iraq are poor nations, which hope to get US aid in the future. Who knows how many billions of dollars Bush has promised them for their relatively tiny troop deployments. Mongolia has recently promised 200 troops. When you think of liberation and freedom, who doesn’t envision Mongolian soldiers?
The goal of every colonial power or occupying force in history has been to find enough collaborators among the local population to maintain control for them. By the 1960s, most colonial powers gave up due to the endless insurgencies, cost of empire and the immorality of occupying Third World nations. Collaborators are nothing short of mercenaries. Only the Kurds have any enthusiasm for the new Iraq, and the US will never give them the independent nation that they want because that would alienate a much more valued ally, Turkey.
The history of the collaborator Iraqi army and police force has been pathetic. The occupation has caused a staggering 60 percent unemployment. Most of the Iraqi collaborators are starving peasants, who are interested only in a paycheck. They have no confidence in the puppet government of Iraq and will run every time they’re confronted with a rebel attack. Often dozens of collaborators are killed or injured while standing in line to enlist. Recent car bombings have wiped out many Iraqi police while having lunch at restaurants. A number of times, the rebels have been sufficiently bold to storm Iraqi police stations.
Another huge problem results from Iraqi rebels infiltrating the police and the army. In one incident, a US officer complained that Iraqi police appeared to have set up his soldiers for a rebel ambush. When confronted, the local Iraqi police commander seemed unconcerned and made a half-hearted response that he would look into it.
To speed up training of the Iraq army, an experiment was done putting US troops in the same compound as newly recruited Iraqi troops. The Americans were more than a little upset about the possibility of having their throats slit in the middle of the night.
In another incident, two busloads of Iraqi recruits were driving down a road, pulled over by heavily armed rebels and executed. The US army had taken away their rifles for this trip. This is typical behavior by the US when dealing with its own soldiers in boot camp. US soldiers in training only carry ammunition during the few days of live fire exercises. Most of the time they’re carrying around unloaded rifles. This is an absolutely suicidal policy for the Iraqi troops, who are in danger of being killed by rebels starting from the moment they get in line to enlist.
Iraqi troops are getting second rate equipment –sometimes of worse quality than the weapons used by the rebels. And forget about getting a good bullet proof vest. Imagine how an Iraqi soldier feels when every American soldier has the latest bullet proof vest complete with Kevlar enclosed ceramic plates while the Iraqi soldier has a cotton shirt to wear.
A cable news show recently discussed a military operation that used some Iraqi troops. A reporter who was on the scene stated that the Iraqi troops were being told what to do and led around by US soldiers. Meanwhile, a neocon politician claimed that the Iraqis were conducting their own operation and providing their own leadership. If the only Iraqis being recruited are starving peasants, there’s not going to be a lot of officer material. Prior to the war, the best Iraqi officers were in the Republican Guard and these men have since moved into the rebel forces.
There has been “talk” about training an Iraqi army for two and a half years. Every once in a while a realistic assessment leaks out about how incapable the Iraqi army is. One article about a secret pentagon report from August, 2005 notes “About half of Iraq’s new police units are still training and cannot conduct operations, while the other half of the police units and two-thirds of the new Iraqi Army battalions are only ‘partially capable’ of counterinsurgency missions, and then only with U.S. help, according to a declassified Pentagon assessment. Only ‘a small number’ of Iraqi security forces are capable of fighting the insurgency without U.S. assistance, while about one-third of the army is capable of ‘planning, executing and sustaining counterinsurgency operations’ with allied support, the analysis said. The assessment, which has not been publicly released, is the most precise analysis of the Iraqis’ readiness that the military has provided to date.”
If the US military had to increase its presence in Iraq from 138,000 to 161,000 this year just to maintain order, how is an army of Iraqi collaborators going to maintain order? We are seeing history repeat itself. Colonialism failed and our thinly-veiled attempt at modern-day colonialism is also failing. Our soldiers are dying for an obviously futile mission. Bush doesn’t care about the lives of US soldiers. All he cares about is his legacy and for that reason, we continue to waste our soldiers’ lives in Iraq.