I've always thought that while we were wrong to disband the Iraqi army, it was nowhere near such an obvious a decision as the chattering class's 20-20 hindsight would have you believe. Christopher Hitchens' latest contrarian foray confirms both of these judgments - I'm not persuaded by his arguments, but neither are they easy to dismiss.
« Haggisprop | Main | The Canon Wars » Why Iraq Has No Army17 Sep 2007 12:49 pm Comments (13)
I bet it wasn't obvious at the time that the whole thing wouldn't be a cake walk either. What was obvious, though, was having a complete know nothing doofus for a Commander in Chief. I wouldn't have trusted him to competently invade and occupy my son's tree house. 
It's pretty hard to take anything Christopher Hitchens writes on Iraq seriously these days. Not because he initially supported the war-- plenty of pundits did-- but because, like William Kristol, he is unwilling to admit that he got a lot of stuff wrong and therefore it looks like a lot of his arguments are an attempt to vindicate the historical position of himself and the people he supported, rather than to figure out what actually went wrong in Iraq.
Hitchens isn't talking about the army at all-- he's talking solely about the officer class, and principally the upper echelons of that. It certainly would have been possible to keep the rank and file of the Iraqi army confined to bases and on the payroll (thereby keeping them fat and happy and out of mischief) while permitting unwilling conscripts to go home and de-Baathizing the upper officers.
Hitchens is right; disbanding the Army was the correct policy. For evidence, all you have to look at is the difference today between the Iraqi Army, which was disbanded, and the Iraqi National Police, which wasn't. The Army today is still weak, but relatively uncorrupt and improving. The Iraqi National Police, on the other hand, is so bad that Gen. Jones recommended disbanding it now and starting from scratch. Seems to me that what we need to do now with respect to the Police is exactly what we did earlier with respect to the Army... so we have a 4 year head start in making the Army a worthy institution. Anyone who believes that disbanding the Army was a mistake ought to have to answer the questions: if it was such a mistake, why is the un-disbanded Iraqi National Police in such awful shape right now? And what makes you believe that, had we not disbanded the Army, it would be in any better shape than the Police are now?
BTW, I loved Bremer's op-ed the other day. Not only was disbanding the Army uncontroversial within the government, but it was so uncontroversial that the media didn't even cover it! All of 2 reporters, neither American, showed up at the press conference. The issue of disbanding is completely 20/20 hindsight.
(a) Christopher f*cking Hitchens?!?!?!? This man has an impressive record of being wrong. (b) Reporters not covering the disbanding? Hm, perhaps, just perhaps, that's because it was a snap decision, not publicized, during a time of chaos. (c) WTF do you mean Al, by not disbanding the Iraqi National Police? I'm sure that the Shiite militias who make up that force would be interested to learn that they're remnants of the Baathis regime. (d) Not content with getting one thing wrong, Al, you forgot that the Iraqi Army is also a f*cked-up pile of crap. What are they up to now, 10 battalions fully capable of operating on their own?
The Iraqi National Police were disbanded. The National Police is the 30-40K national force run by the MoI. It went down when the old Saddam-era MoI did and was reconstituted out of Badrist militias when Bayan Jabr took over the new MoI. Or does Al seriously believe that the old MoI National Police was made up of anti-Sunni Shia extremists? Wow, Saddam must have been more inclusive than we thought! The Iraqi police who were not disbanded were the local police force that dealt with criminal activity, not the National Police (akin to the FBI in role if not in competence) who were just one of the many internal security services. Much of that old police force did not survive past 2005 due to turnover, death, or desertion however. The only Iraqi security force that was not disbanded besides the local police was the old Saddam-era intelligence service. Retagged the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, it is essentially a CIA outfit whose head is Muhammad Shahwani, an old ally of CIA asset Iyad Allawi. The Shia governing coalition does not control it and naturally despises it.
The thesis of No End in Sight--the anti-war documentary Andrew Ferguson produced, much praised by anti-war Democrats-- is that disbanding the army was the biggest mistake of all, pretty much a decisive one. The war was won, but the occupation was lost by virtue of this error. Had the army been kept in place (and few other mistakes not been made) the war would have succeeded. Hence the deciding to go to war was a sound policy, but so badly executed it failed. All this Ferguson and his movie. Now Hitchens contends that disbanding the army was principled and well-considered policy. So then why is it that the situation in Iraq today is so "unbelievably tenuous"? Might it be that the invasion itself was bad policy?
US intelligence srervices had been prepping for the war by promising senior officers in the Iraqi military that if they played along, they'd be taken care of. And then they weren't. It's not so surprising that they were pissed off. The question as to whether or not disbanding the Iraqi military was "the right thing to do" is part of a larger question, which is, to what extent can an existing social order be reshaped by conquest and occupation, which is part of a larger question, which is how much force and repression (i.e. killing) will be necessary to do so, which is part of an even larger question, which is, by what right is a foreign power entitled to conquer, occupy, and reshape another society. These were not questions with which people in the administration were eager to grapple, particularly our Commander in Chief. The moral conundrums of the Iraqi occupation derive in large part from the attempt to dress up a colonialist enterprise as a humanitarian mission. Rather pathetically, some in the administration began to believe their own rhetoric about re-making Iraq into a beacon of democracy for the benighted Arab world. I'm afraid that Christopher Hitchens, a man in lifelong pursuit of a worthy cause, has found this the most worthy cause to which he can atttach himself, which is sad. It's no surprise that he's re-located to Washington, since any faith in the doctrine of reshaping Iraqi society for its own good is virtually unknown outside of the United States. The Iraq ocupation was largely unplanned and grossly mishandled because people in power didn't really want to face up to what they were doing, and to what they were going to have to do to "pacify" the population. Disbanding the Iraq army was a dumb move, not because it caused the insurgency, but simply because it accelerated it. The insurgency was going to happen either way. As many in the US military were fond of saying at the time of the invasion, "Optimism is not a plan."
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Disbanding the army was the politically correct decision by the political appointees, but the less ignorant and more involved you were, the more likely you were to want to keep the army together. In light of the interviews at the linked clip, I think Hitchens' article is characteristic bluster.
Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | September 17, 2007 1:48 PM