Basra fighting highlights Iraqi army’s struggles

By Charles J. Hanley

AP Special Correspondent

updated 3:41 a.m. ET March 30, 2008

Iraq’s new army is “developing steadily,” with “strong Iraqi leaders out front,” the chief U.S. trainer assured the American people.

That was three-plus years ago, the U.S. Army general was David H. Petraeus, and some of those Iraqi officials at the time were busy embezzling more than $1 billion allotted for the new army’s weapons, according to investigators.

The 2004-05 Defense Ministry scandal was just one in an unending series of setbacks in the five-year struggle to “stand up” an Iraqi military and allow hard-pressed U.S. forces to “stand down” from Iraq.

The latest discouraging episode was unfolding this weekend in bloody Basra, the southern city where Iraqi government forces — in their toughest test yet — were still struggling to gain the upper hand in a five-day-old battle with Shiite Muslim militias.

Year by year, the goal of deploying a capable, free-standing Iraqi army has seemed always to slip further into the future. In the latest shift, with Petraeus now U.S. commander in Iraq, the Pentagon’s new quarterly status report quietly drops any prediction of when homegrown units will take over security responsibility nationwide, after last year’s reports had forecast a transition in 2008.

Earlier, in January last year, President Bush said Iraqi forces would take charge in all 18 Iraqi provinces by November 2007. Four months past that deadline, they control only half the 18.

Not enough resources?
Responsibility for these ever-unfulfilled goals lies in Washington, contends retired Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, who preceded Petraeus as chief trainer in Iraq.

“We continue to fail to properly resource and build the very force that will enable a responsible drawdown of our forces,” Eaton told The Associated Press.

Retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, a West Point professor and frequent Iraq visitor, also sees insufficient “energy” in the U.S. effort. “Even now, there is no Iraqi air force; there’s no national military medical system; there’s no maintenance system,” he told a New York audience on March 13.

The current chief trainer counters that his Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq, known as MNSTC-I, has made “huge progress in many areas, quality and quantity.”

“But we’re not free of difficulties,” Lt. Gen. James Dubik told reporters on March 4.

Many reversals
A look back by the AP, as the Iraq conflict enters its sixth year, finds the $22 billion training effort has been a story of uncertain steps and policy reversals, corruption, questionable numbers and distrust, ending with an Iraqi military with narrow capabilities and years more “standing up” ahead.

The first reversal came even before the 2003 U.S. invasion, when the Pentagon discarded prewar plans that called for restructuring the 400,000-man Saddam Hussein-era army into a postwar force of 150,000 to 200,000.

Instead, U.S. occupation chief L. Paul Bremer ordered the old army disbanded, and the Bush administration opted for a token military force to guard Iraq’s borders — an “afterthought,” said Eaton.

“President Bush declared ‘mission accomplished’ on 1 May, and on 9 May I get a phone call, ’Get thee to Iraq and rebuild the Iraqi army.’ I looked at my wife and she said, ’A little late for that.’ You would have expected this to be an ongoing program,” Eaton recalled.

The makeshift plan envisioned putting one 700-man battalion at a time through a nine-week training course — a rate that would have produced a mere 8,000 troops over two years.

Eaton persuaded Defense Department officials to raise that target to 40,000 troops by late 2004, but even that was a “patently inadequate force,” says Ali Allawi, later Iraq’s defense minister.

“Deep suspicions began to be harbored as to the true intentions” of the Americans, Allawi writes in his memoir, “The Occupation of Iraq.”

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