ON RECONSTRUCTION
Two American generals warned Tuesday that the occupation authority's policy of barring former Baath Party members, including senior Iraqi Army officers, from government jobs was self-defeating and breeding resentment against the American-led efforts in the country.
The generals stopped short of criticizing the policy. But their remarks reflect a growing anger and frustration among many senior United States commanders that the policy is excluding many of the skilled Iraqi professionals needed to help the country's political and economic reconstruction, especially in the restive Sunni heartland, even as American officials seek to broker a transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis after June 30.
This might not fuel the talk of revolt, yet...
These Generals are on the record:
General Batiste also said there were a "huge number" of former Iraqi military officers who have been "completely marginalized" by the decision last year by L. Paul Bremer III, Iraq's civilian administrator, to disband the Iraqi Army. "These are proud officers with enormous energy and capability," General Batiste said. "If we harness their capability, it'd be a good thing."
In Mosul, where 60 percent of the city's 1.8 million residents are Sunni, the other general, Brig. Gen. Carter F. Ham said, "I'd like to see a policy that deals with individual cases rather than have a blanket policy."
General Ham, who commands nearly 20,000 American and Iraqi forces in the north, said the "de-Baathification" policy has caused many Sunnis to feel "disenfranchised" from the emerging Iraqi government. "That creates a somewhat destabilizing effect," he said.
Of Iraq's 25 million people, about 2.5 million belonged to the Baath Party during Mr. Hussein's rule. After the fall of his government, Mr. Bremer and the Iraqi Governing Council decreed that the top three levels of the party membership could not be on the government payroll. More than 120,000 people lost their jobs.
Some were loyalists of Mr. Hussein's, but many others were doctors, nurses, university professors, and other professionals who argued that they had joined the Baath Party only to feed their families or advance their careers, not out of loyalty to Mr. Hussein. General Batiste said 70 Baathists on the faculty of a college here in Tikrit remained unemployed. "We need to draw up a list of those Baathists who must be held accountable for their crimes, but let the rest of the Baathists have a future in the new Iraq," said a senior American military officer in Iraq.
ON PRIVATIZING WARFARE
It's one thing for the military to outsource food and laundry services to private firms, as it started doing aggressively in the 1990's, but it's quite another to outsource the actual fighting. That is what the Pentagon is perilously close to doing in Iraq.
The grisly deaths of four American security contractors in Falluja last month underscored America's troubling reliance on hired guns. After the 130,000 American troops, the nearly 20,000 people employed by private security firms now form the second-largest contingent -- surpassing the British -- in the coalition of the willing, although a private guard's services cost as much as $1,500 a day.
The benign term "security guard" does not convey the true role of these armed men, many of them former military commandos lured into retirement by bigger paychecks. They are hardly sitting behind desks and signing visitors into office buildings, and not all of them are doing what would be more appropriate tasks, like guarding oil wells. Hired guns are charged with the security of the occupation authority's headquarters in Baghdad, and of Paul Bremer III, the American proconsul.
Contractors from Blackwater USA, the employer of the four Americans savagely killed in Falluja, recently fought a full-fledged battle with militants in Najaf, and they were even able to call in a company-owned helicopter for air cover. The Pentagon seems to be outsourcing at least part of its core responsibilities for securing Iraq instead of facing up to the need for more soldiers.
Increasingly relying on these loosely accountable contractors is bound to backfire. As the United States prepares to hand the sovereignty of Iraq back to its people, the fact that the Iraqi Army and police force are now being trained by a private company risks sending the message that loyalty is owed not to one's country, but to whoever gets the contract. It is difficult to coordinate the dozen or so private firms in Iraq, and there is little regulation of their training and recruitment.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has pledged that the Pentagon will keep looking for ways to "outsource and privatize." When it comes to core security and combat roles, this is ill advised. The Pentagon should be recruiting and training more soldiers, rather than running the risk of creating a new breed of mercenaries.
Boneheadedness at the very, very top. Where Oh where are the checks and balances: Is Congress s-l-o-w-l-y getting on top of these issues?