they all want to kill U.S. soldiers.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Filed at 4:00 p.m. ET Today
BAGHDAD (AP) -- U.S. troops battled Iraqi police suspected of links to Iranian-backed Shiite militiamen, killing six in a rare firefight between American soldiers and their Iraqi partners. Friday's clash underscored the deep infiltration of militants in the country's security forces.
http://www.usatoday.com/...
Iraqi police assisted gunmen
U.S. Army report analyzes attack that killed 5 GIs
By Gregg Zoroya
USA TODAY
A previously undisclosed Army investigation into an audacious January attack in Karbala that killed five U.S. soldiers concludes that Iraqi police working alongside American troops colluded with insurgents.
Read the USA Today article. It sounds like a mob hit.
It's bad enough that or troops have had to fight dead-enders, Baathists, extremist militias, and foreign jihadists. But now, we will apparently have to fight the U.S.-armed and trained Iraqi police forces as well.
In addition to the six police officers, seven gunmen were also killed in Friday's clash in eastern Baghdad, sparked when U.S. troops arrested a police lieutenant, the American military said in a statement....American forces have arrested police in the past for Shiite militia links -- but rarely have the Americans and the uniformed police fallen into an open street battle, particularly one as fierce as Friday's.
I've always thought that "insurgent" was a deliberate and wildly inaccurate word to describe Iraqis hostile to the United States Army. The dictionary describes an insurgent is "a person who revolts against a lawful government or established civil authority". So the invaders, by calling people who shoot at them "insurgents", seize the linguistic high ground. But is there any truth in asserting that the U.S. has established a legitimate civil authority in Iraq? Not unless you're on the Kool-Aid diet.
Listen to Jay Garner, the first person assigned to establish "legitimate civil authority" in Iraq:
Essentially, I guess the first day I got to Baghdad, I was a lame duck...I think if I'd had 120 days, I could have gotten a hell of a lot of stuff done... If we had been quicker on getting people back to work, if we had been quicker on getting people involved in the governmental process, I think that we stood a chance.
http://www.pbs.org/...
But Garner was relieved by President Bush, who sent in Paul Bremer before Garner had the chance to re-establish a functioning government. And Bremer's first decision as head of the CPA was De-Baathification, which meant firing basically the entire Iraqi civil service. He followed that up by disbanding the military, which meant everyone in the country with a gun was now unemployed. Genius moves, no? A nation that had lived in fear, dominated by a brutal minority, hellbent on revenge against their former oppressors, suddenly without any governing structure to contain their anger. Our policies created the constituency for both the Shiite militia and the Sunni resistance, and ruined any chance for reconciliation between the two.
Civil authority stems from power, not rhetoric. Saddam had the power and authority; people who defied him were tortured or killed. While the U.S. army has done more than it's fair share of torturing and killing, it cannot do them institutionally without a uniformed opponent fighting for a legitimate civil authority. (If they were capable of institutional brutality, Cheney would have established a military dictatorship in this country years ago.)
So call them insurgents, call them militia, call them al-Quaeda, called them police. It doesn't matter; the truth is that the U.S. failed to establish the rule of law following the invasion, and Iraqis have to fend to fend for themselves. In the Wild West, whoever has the quickest draw rules the town; the extremists on all sides have guns and are willing to use them.
Four years after the invasion, Iraq is still a power vacuum. Bush's pathetic escalation is way too little, way too late to fill the void. I remember an early quote from an Iraqi interviewed in the Times (sorry, no link) to the effect that Saddam was bad, but now we have a hundred little Saddams, and that is infinitely worse. And now they are called the Iraqi police.
Can we bring the troops home yet?.