The Redhunter

Readers interested in the De-Baathification program will want to read the article. Here will will only consider what Bremer has to say about the Iraqi Army.

The first question Bremer addresses is the nature of the Iraqi Army under Saddam and what happened to it when we invaded.

The war's critics have also comprehensively misunderstood the "disbanding" of Hussein's army, arguing that we kicked away a vital pillar that kept the country stable and created a pool of unemployed, angry men ripe for rebellion. But this fails to reckon with the true nature of Hussein's killing machine and the situation on the ground.

It's somewhat surprising at this late date to have to remind people of the old army's reign of terror. In the 1980s, it waged a genocidal war against Iraq's minority Kurds, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and more than 5,000 people in a notorious chemical-weapons attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja. After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Iraq's majority Shiites rose up against Hussein, whose army machine-gunned hundreds of thousands of men, women and children and threw their corpses into mass graves. It's no wonder that Shiites and Kurds, who together make up more than 80 percent of Iraq's population, hated Hussein's military.

Bremer is dead on in his description of the Iraqi Army. One thing made clear by the Iraqi Perspectives Project was that the entire purpose of the army under Saddam was to keep him and his cronies in power. Only second on Saddam's list was regional threats, third the United States and other coalition powers.

I think that many of us in the West here the term "army", and just assume that to some degree they're all the same. And, after all, Saddam's army had all the trappings of a Western one. But dig beneath the surface and you find something totally different.

Keeping number 1 in power is not always the prime mission of an army in totalitarian countries. In Nazi Germany the SS served this role, with the army in the role of conquerer foreign lands, for example.

Further, it's not as if the old Iraqi Army was a fine fighting force. In fact, it was rife with internal, structural problems

Before the 2003 war, the army had consisted of about 315,000 miserable draftees, almost all Shiite, serving under a largely Sunni officer corps of about 80,000. The Shiite conscripts were regularly brutalized and abused by their Sunni officers. When the draftees saw which way the war was going, they deserted and, like their officers, went back home. But before the soldiers left, they looted the army's bases right down to the foundations.

The Iraqi Army fell apart as our forces reached Bagdad in April of 2003. The plain fact is that it disintigrated before our eyes. Why, then, did he not try and recall it?

Some in the U.S. military and the CIA's Baghdad station suggested that we try to recall Hussein's army. We refused, for overwhelming practical, political and military reasons.

For starters, the draftees were hardly going to return voluntarily to the army they so loathed; we would have had to send U.S. troops into Shiite villages to force them back at gunpoint. And even if we could have assembled a few all-Sunni units, the looting would have meant they'd have no gear or bases.

Moreover, the political consequences of recalling the army would have been catastrophic. Kurdish leaders made it clear to me that recalling Hussein-era forces would make their region secede, which would have triggered a civil war and tempted Turkey and Iran to invade Iraq to prevent the establishment of an independent Kurdistan. Many Shiite leaders who were cooperating with the U.S.-led forces would have taken up arms against us if we'd called back the perpetrators of the southern killing fields of 1991.

Finally, neither the U.S.-led coalition nor the Iraqis could have relied on the allegiance of a recalled army. This lesson was driven home a year later, when the Marines unilaterally recalled a single brigade of Hussein's former army, without consulting with the Iraqi government or the CPA. This "Fallujah Brigade" quickly proved disloyal and had to be disbanded. Moreover, the Marines' action so rattled the Shiites and Kurds that it very nearly derailed the political process of returning sovereignty over the country to the Iraqi people -- further proof of the extreme danger of relying on Hussein's old army.

So, after full coordination within the U.S. government, including the military, I issued an order to build a new, all-volunteer army.

I haven't studied the issue in detail so I can't say with 100% certainty that everything Bremer is correct. However, I do think that of the problems we did make "disbanding" the old Iraqi Army and building a new one from the ground up isn't one of them.

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