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January 11, 2006
Iraq War Fallacies: "We Should Have Kept the Iraqi Army"
One of the most persistent myths is that we should have kept the Iraqi army of Saddam, or at least parts of it, after our initial invasion of Iraq in 2003. One hears this so often from commentators that I do not think any links or quotes are necessary.
But just like the idea that we need(ed) "More Troops!" in Iraq, it is rarely examined. I don't think I have ever heard a interviewer question the claim by a guest that "we should have kept the Iraqi army". It gets a complete pass.
In an interview published yesteday on NRO, Kathryn Jean Lopez asked Paul Bremer about this very issue:
Lopez: What's the biggest myth about your time in Iraq you want to set people straight about in this book?Bremer: I suppose the myth that we made a mistake “disbanding” the Iraqi army. The facts are these: There was not a single Iraqi army unit intact in the country at Liberation. There was no army to “disband.” It had “self-demobilized,” in the Pentagon’s phrase. Hundreds of thousand of Shia draftees, seeing which way the war was going, had simply gone home. They were not going to come back into a hated army.
The army and intelligence services had been vital instruments of Saddam’s brutal regime. He had used the army in a years’ long campaign against the Kurds, killing tens of thousands of them, culminating in the use of chemical weapons against men, women, and children in 1988. The army had brutally suppressed the Shia uprising after the first Gulf war, machine gunning tens of thousands of Shia civilians into mass graves in the south. Together these two groups make up about 80 percent of the population.
So recalling the Iraqi army (which would have meant sending American soldiers into Shia homes, farms, and villages and forcing them back into the army under their Sunni officers) would have had dire political consequences. The Kurds told me clearly that they would not have accepted it, and would have seceded from Iraq. Such a move would probably have ended Shia cooperation with the Coalition and perhaps even led to a Shia uprising, initially against such an Iraqi army, and eventually against the Coalition.
But we knew we had to find a place in Iraqi society for the former army men. So we welcomed them back into the new army, including officers up to the level of colonel. And we started paying the other officers a monthly stipend, which continued right to the end of the occupation.
See, I told you so.
Unquestioned
Just as with the claim that we need(ed) "More Troops!" in Iraq, the problem is not so much as to who is right and who is wrong, it's that those who make the claim never back it up with anything. The issue of whether we need(ed) more troops is extremely complicated, and not the simple one that so many seen to suppose (see link above).
Such is the case with the issue of Saddam's Iraqi army. In my opinion, it is much more obvious that keeping - really bringing back - Saddam's army would have been a terrible mistake, but I'll admit that reasonable people can debate. The key is to get the issues out into the open and make all parties answer them.
To be fair, Bremer does think that we should have had more troops in Iraq. In the interview, he says that he argued with military commanders over this issue. But what critics should note is that this also dispels the myth that Bush, Rumsfeld, et al, were isolated and not listening to their commanders, or only heard what they wanted to hear, or that commanders were intimidated, or...whatever the latest version of this one is from the Kos crowd.
Problems of Analysis
In a post last summer, I wrote about Static vs Dynamic Analysis:
People who blithely say that we “need(ed) more troops” or that we should have “kept the Iraqi Army together” assume that only positive results would come from such a decision. They seem not to realize that there were potential negative consequences from taking a decision other than what we did.More specifically, they seem not to realize that if you change one factor in the equation of history, everything else changes too.
For example, if you raise taxes by 10% on an item, it is invalid to automatically assume that the government will get 10% more money. It is true that on some items, such as cigarettes, the increase in revinue will be about 10%, because the demand curve for such items is inelastic. But on other items, such as candy bars, people will simply adjust their spending habits, buy less of the product, and the government may not end up with any appreciable increase in revinue at all.
Following up on this, I wrote about some of the problems that may have occured had we reconstituted Saddam's army:
Once again, those who say we should have kept or recalled the Iraqi army only see the potiential positives. They fail to even consider that doing this may have made the situation worse.Armies in many third-world countries are used as much to oppress the population as they are to defend the borders, sometimes more so. In the case of Iraq Saddam had long used some units to carry out his murderous atrocities. Many Iraqis didn't have much respect for much of the army, and saw it as an oppressive institution. To have kept it in place might have made the population even more angry at us. Remember, things can always be worse.
Further, Iraqi units were organized along sectarian lines. Shi'is, tired of Sunni oppression, might have taken this opportunity to seek revenge. Shi'ite units might well have moved into Sunni neighborhoods and wrecked havoc. Same with the Kurds. Indeed, it is not hard to imagine Iraqi units fighting each other. And who is to say that they would not have turned on us is an opportunity presented itself?
Imagine the consequences of any perceived atrocity; "human-rights" groups would immediately protest that it was all the fault of the United States, that because we invaded and kept the Iraqi units together, we were responsible for their actions. The western media would have a field day.
None of these things might have happened. But they might well have happened, which is why, as Paul Bremer says, our decision to start from scratch was the correct one.
Problems of History
People forget that Saddam's army was just that: Saddam's army. James Dunnigan of StrategyPage explains:
The Iraqi army has been, for over half a century, the chief source of tyranny and oppression in the country. Army commanders overthrew the government time after time, and used their soldiers to brutalize the population. By keeping all, or part, of the army intact, and armed, coalition risked a quick return of the warlord attitude that gave the Iraqi people dictators like Saddam (and several others who preceded him.) Saddam’s innovation was to establish the Republican Guard as a force to keep the army from overthrowing him. Saddam also freely fired, or executed, army officers who appeared likely to try and stage a coup. And there were several coup attempts by army officers, even in the face of Saddam’s secret police and Republican Guard. Keeping the old Iraqi army in business was just asking for more trouble.
Bottom line; don't let anyone tell you that one of our mistakes was in "not keeping the Iraqi army". It's a myth.
Posted by Tom at January 11, 2006 8:27 AM
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