Decision to Disband Iraqi Army Cost U.S. Time and Credibility

[Kat 333]

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Seven months after the fall of Baghdad, a single Iraqi army battalion exists to reinforce overstretched U.S.-led occupation troops. As casualties climb and large foreign armies remain on the sidelines, U.S. authorities are racing to recruit a credible Iraqi force to bolster the authority of a future Baghdad government.

Before the war, President Bush approved a plan that would have put several hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers on the U.S. payroll and kept them available to provide security, repair roads and prepare for unforeseen postwar tasks. But that project was stopped abruptly in late May by L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, who ordered the demobilization of Iraq's entire army, including largely apolitical conscripts.

Bremer reversed himself a month later, but by then the occupation had lost not merely time and momentum but also credibility among former soldiers and their families, an important segment of Iraq's population.

Now, the Americans are trying to recover -- including rehiring some of the same soldiers they demobilized -- at what one top Defense Department official called "warp speed." And while the administration's handling of the Iraqi army has been widely viewed as a fundamental decision of the occupation, a number of U.S. officials and analysts are saying it was fundamentally wrong.

"This was a mistake, to dissolve the army and the police," said Ayad Alawi, head of the security committee of the Iraqi Governing Council. "We absolutely not only lost time. The vacuum allowed our enemies to regroup and to infiltrate the country."
Retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, a vocal opponent of the war, calls the move the Bush administration's "worst mistake" in postwar Iraq.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63423-2003Nov19?language=printer