Basra fighting highlights Iraqi army’s struggles

Abdulwahab al-Qassab, a retired Iraqi major general who observed developments from a post at Baghdad University, contends the Americans never wanted to rebuild a solid Iraqi army.

“It wasn’t welcomed by the Israelis, the Kurdish factions that used to fight the Iraqi army, and some of the Shiites,” al-Qassab said in an interview.

Walter B. Slocombe, who was Bremer’s chief defense aide, denied to the AP that Israel’s interests influenced U.S. actions, but he and other U.S. officials have acknowledged that the animosity of Iraq’s Kurds and Shiites to the old Iraqi army helped shape those early decisions.

As 2003 wore on, Vinnell Corp., the U.S. military contractor hired to do the training, proved unequal to the task. The first Iraqi battalion, graduating in October, quickly fell apart because of desertions, and the second battalion refused to fight against insurgents in Fallujah in April 2004. The Jordanian army, meanwhile, was asked to take over training Iraqi officers.

As of June 2004, when Bremer’s occupation authority gave way to a sovereign Iraqi government, the military still numbered only 7,000 men, as the focus shifted to fielding Iraqi police. Paul Wolfowitz, deputy defense secretary, predicted — incorrectly — the Iraqis could soon “take local control of the cities.”

Plagued with problems
The evolving training program, now a mixed U.S.-Iraqi effort, was plagued with problems. Petraeus’ new MNSTC-I was slow to be staffed. Meanwhile, top Defense Ministry officials, including the minister, Hazem Shaalan, were methodically looting the procurement budget of at least $1.3 billion, Iraqi investigators allege. Shaalan, who denies the accusations, and most of the others left the country by mid-2005.

By then the Pentagon was reporting 60,000 “trained and equipped” Iraqi troops available, a number achieved only by integrating lightly armed national guard units into the army. American commanders “do not report reliable data” on training and equipping Iraqi forces, U.S. government auditors complained. By late 2005, the U.S. command had to acknowledge that only one of 86 Iraqi army battalions was ready to fight on its own.

The Iraqis still were not given artillery, big mortars or other heavy weapons. Iraq’s political unpredictability and dangerous sectarian-political divides clearly made the Americans wary that heavy weapons might be turned against them, concludes Arab military analyst Nizar Adul Kader.

“This could have been one of the fears that Americans had to take into consideration,” said Kader, a retired Lebanese major general.

Weapons passed to insurgents?
Auditors also found that the training command kept such poor records on distribution of personal weapons to Iraqi soldiers that some may have been passed on to insurgents or anti-American militias.

When Sunni-Shiite hostilities exploded into a bloodbath in 2006 — up to 60 civilian killings a day in Baghdad alone — it exposed the unreliability of the Iraqi military, some of whose units, paralyzed by desertions and reluctant officers and troops, failed to back up U.S. operations.

The U.S. command’s goals for a homegrown takeover of most Iraqi security slipped — from spring 2006, to late summer, and then beyond. In November 2006, the Pentagon forecast that all 18 provinces would come under Iraqi security control “in 2007.”

Reviews in 2007, by a congressionally mandated commission, by Government Accountability Office analysts, by the Pentagon itself, found that Iraq’s sectarian animosities had permeated and weakened army units, heavily Shiite and Kurdish. A civil war among Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni factions could shatter the military.

Last November, GAO auditors again sharply questioned Pentagon claims on the number of Iraqi battalions able to operate “independently,” since such units often depend on U.S. fuel, ammunition and other supplies, American advisers and intelligence, and U.S. air support.

Desertions persisted. In its latest quarterly report, in early March, the Pentagon says some 197,000 military personnel have now been trained, but that number includes the equivalent of two divisions — 27,000 men — estimated to have gone AWOL in 2007. Some 224,000 police are listed as trained, including an unknown number who left their posts.

Long list of unmet needs
The Iraqi military’s list of unmet needs remains long: artillery and modern armor; advanced communications and intelligence systems; a logistics network able to supply everything from food and fuel to transport and ammunition; combat hospitals; airpower.

“This is not a balanced fighting force,” said al-Qassab, the retired Iraqi general. “It’s only people armed with assault rifles and pickup trucks and they go and raid like a militia.”

The Iraqis and Americans are working to make Iraqi logistics self-sufficient by mid-2009. But as for “fire support,” training command spokesman Lt. Col. Dan Williams said, “heavier artillery is still a ways down the road.”

Regarding Iraq’s tiny air force, a handful of helicopters, old transports and light planes, “in my opinion, we were late to start on this,” Air Force Maj. Gen. Robert R. Allardice told the AP last June, as he took over aviation training in Baghdad.

Today, as he leaves the command, Allardice confirms there are still no plans for modern jet fighters for the Iraqis, only small, propeller-driven attack planes.

Chief trainer Dubik, meanwhile, is troubled by a shortage of midlevel Iraqi officers. The Pentagon’s March report says this shortage “will take years to close.”

It looks like years, not months, will be the measure of progress. After a half-decade of war, Dubik says Iraqi defense officials don’t expect to take over internal security until as late as 2012, and won’t be able to defend Iraq’s borders until 2018.

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