Why Iraq Has No Army (The Atlantic Monthly 12/05)

[Up2Late]

The Atlantic Monthly | December 2005

Why Iraq Has No Army

(page 1 of 6)

An orderly exit from Iraq depends on the development of a viable Iraqi security force, but the Iraqis aren't even close. The Bush administration doesn't take the problem seriously—and it never has

by James Fallows

.....

When Saddam Hussein fell, the Iraqi people gained freedom. What they didn't get was public order. Looting began immediately, and by the time it abated, signs of an insurgency had appeared. Four months after the invasion the first bomb that killed more than one person went off; two years later, through this past summer, multiple-fatality bombings occurred on average once a day. The targets were not just U.S. troops but Iraqi civilians and, more important, Iraqis who would bring order to the country. The first major attack on Iraq's own policemen occurred in October of 2003, when a car bomb killed ten people at a Baghdad police station. This summer an average of ten Iraqi policemen or soldiers were killed each day. It is true, as U.S. officials often point out, that the violence is confined mainly to four of Iraq's eighteen provinces. But these four provinces contain the nation's capital and just under half its people.

The crucial need to improve security and order in Iraq puts the United States in an impossible position. It can't honorably leave Iraq—as opposed to simply evacuating Saigon-style—so long as its military must provide most of the manpower, weaponry, intelligence systems, and strategies being used against the insurgency. But it can't sensibly stay when the very presence of its troops is a worsening irritant to the Iraqi public and a rallying point for nationalist opponents—to say nothing of the growing pressure in the United States for withdrawal.

<http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200512/iraq-army>

(Unfortunately, as you can read below, that's all we get for free, you have to subscribe to get the rest. Any subscribers here? ;-), BUT, The author was interviewed about what he wrote on WHYY's "Fresh Air," He said a lot of interesting things (available online at this link)<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5015143>)

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[ugarte]

1. Iraq has lots of armies...nt