Dissolving Iraq’s Military
It Was Always The Right Decision
By Daniel Muniz

As history is being written about the Iraqi conflict, it is inevitable to point fingers at what went wrong while conveniently glossing over what went right. One such bogus accusation has been the decision to dismantle Saddam Hussein’s army. With any failure, it becomes expedient to simply adopt an opposing position for the sake of adopting it because it has to be better than from what the course of action was that led to the boondoggle. And being right or wrong is totally irrelevant because the finger pointers don’t want to be on the side of the failure.

That is precisely what happened with Paul Bremer, the administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). Although he made a lot of bad decisions and exercised poor judgment in governing Iraq, Bremer made the right choice in formally dismissing Iraq’s armed forces and starting from scratch.

With finger pointing and the search for scapegoats, critics from the right as well as from the left assert that the military should have been left intact and immediately employed to pacify the country right after the invasion. Even George W. Bush jumped on the bandwagon in an effort to distant himself from the mess he created by insisting that he did not know how the order to dissolve the Iraqi armed forces ever got approved because it was always his policy to keep it in one piece. Bremer simply pulled out documentation to show that Bush’s claim is totally false.

It is tempting to believe that the United States could have found a ruthless general to run the Iraqi military apparatus but would such a move have prevented the subsequent bloodshed?

There are serious problems with this assertion.

The Baath Party was corrupt and brutal. Replacing it with a new leader and keeping the Iraqi military machine in place doesn’t solve the original problems of a fascist military state. Saddam’s army would still have to face the same unrest except that it would be the same army oppressing its people with the tacit approval of the United States. And it would be doing it with the same people and the same tools that Saddam used.

For the psyche of this war-torn nation, it would have been disastrous to use the identical apparatus that previously repressed the Iraqi people in order to achieve our goals. Saddam’s Iraq was a military state with a secret police that cruelly imposed its will on the populace. Using a military with such a dismal reputation would have surely created a situation far worse than the insurgency that we are currently facing.

But more to the point, if we had done precisely that, the very same critics would have immediately claimed what a stupid decision it was to use Saddam’s old army.

So if dismantling the armed forces was not the magical solution to all of our problems, what about the horrendous difficulties in creating a new Iraqi military?

Graduation of Cadets of the New Iraqi Army

Of course there were serious problems but nearly all of them were self-inflicted.

The most immediate obstacle was the lack of post-war planning. The Pentagon and the State Department saw themselves as liberators instead of as occupiers. That meant that there were only a handful of responsibilities that we were on the hook for and that everything else would eventually take care of itself.

Well, it didn’t work out that way. The country quickly fell into anarchy with various warlords jockeying for control of their fiefdoms while performing “ethnic cleansing” of their enclaves.

And when real reconstruction efforts finally did begin, it was hampered by the infighting between the Pentagon and the State Department. The bureaucracies of the civilian agencies and our combat forces never worked in unison and they never shared a common doctrine so they were never on the same page when it came implementing important objectives. Interestingly, now that the Pentagon has been burned by the bureaucratic chaos in Iraq, they now intend to perform nation building entirely on their own instead of relying on civilian agencies for future conflicts.

Another problem was de-Baathification. Zero tolerance meant using zero common sense. Although plenty of Baath Party members are subject to war crimes, there were still many of them who had nothing to do with the atrocities. These people had to join the Baath Party because there was no other way to advance their careers without its membership. Sadly, they were denied any role whatsoever.

After World War II, the United States had absolutely no problem using former Nazis to help rebuild Germany. In fact, the many Nazis who were not accused of war crimes were vitally needed in the reconstruction effort and one particular scientist, Werner Von Braun, helped our Apollo project get a man to the moon.

Consequently, Iraq needed these people instead of throwing them out to the wolves.

Overall, dissolving the Iraqi military was the right decision and Iraq is so much better off with an armed forces consisting of professional volunteers that can be respected instead of being feared.

It is unfortunate that the Bush Administration bungled so many objectives in Iraq but creating a new military was one of the few things done right. The effort was agonizingly slow and not properly planned out but it is finally starting to show positive results.

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