TallDave wrote:I remember yelling at my radio when I heard Paul Bremer float the idea of disbanding the Iraqi army and kicking all the Bath party members out of government.
This is one of the more persistent falsehoods out there.
First off, the Iraqi Army self-disbanded during the invasion; all the Shia conscripts just went home. Secondly, the Iraqi Army was a top-heavy sectarian institution built around loyalty to Saddam and not letting anyone else accumulate too much power; it had
thousands of Sunni generals and discipline was not enforced by an NCO corps but by the ISI (try to imagine for a minute if the U.S. Army had no sergeants but instead discipline was maintained by a branch of the CIA). It was simply not a viable institution outside of a police state.
Secondly, the Baathists were and are
extremely unpopular with the 80% of Iraqis who aren't Sunnis; leaving them in power would have been like leaving the Nazis in charge of France -- instant civil war. Quite a few Shia and Kurds are still of the opinion all the Baathists should be executed without trial.
The major mistake in the occupation was something much more basic: we didn't work with the tribal sheiks who were the real power brokers, and we gave too much credence to the idea that Iraqis should solve their own problems without our help. These errors allowed AQ to get established with Sunnis and JAM to become established in the Shia areas.
This all seems obvious in retrospect but at the time the U.S. was a great pains to not be seen as too heavy-handed, so our troops were basically hiding in giant bases with minimal contact in the population -- pretty much exactly the opposite of good COIN.
However, our commitment to democracy and basic rights eventually overcame those problems, once Petraeus acknowledged the mistake and made protecting Iraqis our top priority rather than "force protection." AQ and JAM were basically thugs and that quickly became obvious to all Iraqis. So he Sunni sheiks jumped at the chance to turn on AQ, and when Maliki sent the new Iraqi Army into Basra they were greeted with cheers. Iraqis have risked their lives to vote and overwhelmingly believe democracy is the best way forward for Iraq.
A difference of opinion is not a falsehood. The reason I was yelling at my radio is because I realized immediately that it was going to result in exactly what happened. All of my friends had to listen incessantly to my predictions of guerrilla warfare from the disenfranchised sunni's and bathists, and I knew that many Americans and Iraqis would die unnecessarily as a result of this decision.
Let me be blunt ugly. The shites are much stupider than the sunnis. This is why the 35% of sunnis could govern the 65% shias.
Yes the Iraqi army was a mess, but it represented employment for everyone in it, and if they would have received reassurances that they and their families would continue to be able to subsist on their military pay, then their immediate desire to kill us all would have been assuaged.
The Iraqi army could have been rebuilt by attrition of the worst offenders and the addition of competent and (more) loyal (to the new regime) officers and men.
The same could have been done with Sunni/Baathists in the government.
You may argue that this would have took too long with the insurgency raging about Iraq, but it is my contention that the action of throwing these people out on their ear is exactly what precipitated the insurgency. If we hadn't did what we did, there would have been no, or at least a dramatically reduced insurgency, composed primarily of Sadam Husseins "Dead enders" who were so deep in the old Administration that they could never be absolved of it's crimes.
Yeah, the whole Iraqi Army AND the Iraqi government were complicit in Sadam's crimes, but many acted our of fear for their own lives. From their perspective, being fired for doing what they HAD to do was just unfair, and of course it filled them with a terrible resolve for revenge.
If we had cut off the 5% worst offenders from the other 95% of bit players, we would have had the support of the 95% instead of their hatred and will to kill us.
Ergo, the Insurgency would have been weak and short lived.
Now you may not agree with my assessment, but I would not say that your opinion is a "falsehood." Hell, you might even be right, and I might even be wrong, but in any case, it is not satisfactorily determined beyond a reasonable doubt one way or the other.
I'm just saying, the way we did it with the Nazi's in GERMANY, (not France. That's a false analogy.) is the way we should have done it with the Baathists in Iraq. Give them a stake in the future of the New Government, and they will be far more willing to support it, or at least not fight against it.
David