Chris Hitchens, in his latest missive on Slate, opines "It Was Right To Dissolve the Iraqi Army: We broke America’s terrible habit of ruling by proxy through military regimes". Hitchens has surged up best seller list with "god is Not Great", yet when it comes to Iraq, his preaching seems contradictory upon this very point. Iraq’s constitution says Iraq is already an Islamic nation. To paraphrase Lincoln at Gettysburg: Now Iraq is engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. Hitchens’ much-ballyhooed Iraqi Democracy is no such thing: it is in fact an Islamic entity. The only remaining question is which form of Islam shall rule Iraq hereafter.
Ever the pedant, Hitchens feels obliged to enter a few bon mots seemingly extracted from the moldy dispatches of the British and French general staff. Hitchens archly compares the Surge to a Retreat, using the phrase "strategic withdrawal to prepared positions" to describe a rout. The only place I can find the phrase "strategic withdrawal to prepared positions" is in a 1942 Canadian cartoon depicting a Mountie leading ethnic Japanese away to the prepared positions of an internment camp at double quick time. How hideously ironic.
As for that business about "reculer pour mieux sauter", literally to back up to take a running jump at something, this little aphorism might be best applied to Hitchens himself. For the man speaks from both sides of his mouth. Iron determination to hold onto the ring in Iraq harks back to the era of Churchill’s Iraq, where little biplanes soared over troublesome locals, dropping canisters of mustard gas upon them.
The Iraqi Army should have been dissolved, says Hitchens, replaced with local and national elements loyal to our side and the "still-vestigial Iraqi government". The Iraqi Army was as much a victim of Saddam’s tender mercies as any other entity in Iraq. There is a story told of Saddam after Gulf War 1: Saddam ruefully muses over Iraq’s rout from Kuwait and asks one of his military subordinates what history will make of it all. The subordinate, in a moment of inspired bravery replies "It will be considered one of the greatest defeats in the history of the world." Saddam snarls back "Well, that’s just what you think."
Iraq’s army was an interesting entity. Saddam was no fool: he knew Iraq rather better than we ever will. He organized things along tribal lines, creating Iraq’s first truly multi-ethnic society: the Iraqi Army had far more Shia than Sunni in its ranks. This stands to reason, for there were far more Shia than Sunni in his secular Ba’ath Party.
The Iraqi military, like Hitler’s Wehrmacht (later to become the Bundeswehr), was composed in the main of ordinary draftees sent to fight Iran in a war of aggression. When confronted by children intent on martyrdom, carrying nothing but sticks, the sickened Iraqi soldiers refused to fight. Yet they did fight at Khorramshahr, a siege larger and more deadly than Stalingrad. When Iran almost broke through the swamps of the Shatt, using flat-bottomed boats with machineguns in the prow, Saddam panicked and shelled the area with poison gas. In the process, he killed more of his own men than Iran’s, but he did stop the advance. Faut de mieux, Iraq’s identity was shaped by the war with Iran.
The Iraqi Army had what the USSR called Zampolit, political enforcers in the ranks. Saddam’s chief complaint, while he was yet in power, was that he was constantly lied-to about this and that. In the ghoulish world of Saddam’s army, once the world’s fourth-largest, the spies and toadies held sway. The Iraqi military was not used to round up political prisoners: that was the job of Saddam’s mukhabarat.
Bremer and his well-spoken idiot sidekick, the execrable Wormtongue Ryan Crocker, were directly responsible for the summary dissolution of the Iraqi Army. This strategy was urged upon them by a certain Achmed Chalabi, a man who now resides in Tehran, enjoying his ill-gotten gains, including funds purloined from the US State Department, the CIA and the Coalition Provisional Authority. This Chalabi has faded from view, but in his day, he was a nightmarish figure, like a parasitic wasp laying its egg inside a seemingly powerless spider.
When Saddam’s troops took off their uniforms and fled in their small clothes before the advancing Americans, it was clear these soldiers had no fight left in them. Jay Garner once walked the streets of Ramadi and Fallujah, while those cities still stood with one stone atop another and talked openly to the fearful Sunni sheikhs. When Garner and Crocker (let us never forget the role of Ryan Crocker in this, for he is the one constant throughout this story) disbanded Iraq’s army, they created the power vacuum into which AQI moved, setting in motion the horrible fights in Anbar Province.
Bremer and Crocker’s dissolution of Iraq’s military was an act of unparalleled madness. In the American civil war, Confederate troops were pardoned, made to swear an oath of loyalty and sent home. Hitler’s Bundeswehr was reconstituted in short order, though his SS was not. Perhaps Saddam’s elite Republican Guard should not have been reconstituted, but the ordinary line units were innocent of anything but running through the streets of Baghdad in their tidy-whities. They did not fight us, they surrendered, and they could have been put to good use attenuating looters and death squads. They had no loyalty to Saddam, but they were loyal to Iraq.
Ever the contrarian, Hitchens indulges in projection: believing Bush imagines the Iraqi Army should have been kept intact. Because the old secular Ba’athists were kept far from power, they left Iraq, with their money, and installed themselves in Syria and Jordan, especially Syria, where Ba’athists still hold sway. From there, they plot the destruction of the Shii.
Hitchens is correct in one respect: we did not govern Iraq by proxy through military regimes. We have instead recapitulated the idiocy of the French in Lebanon, allowing governments and political parties to form along sectarian lines. As for the Abysmal Traditions of a spectacularly cruel internal police force, the consumer of the national income, we have not only tolerated but actively collaborated in the formation of Iraq’s Interior Ministry, far nastier than even Saddam’s mukhabarat. Saddam’s secret police only went after putative schemers against Saddam, the Interior Ministry has death squads every bit as nasty as those in Chile, Greece, Indonesia and the numerous other cases Hitchens enumerates.
I have previously disposed of this nonsense about Saddams army being sectarian in nature. The only sectarian part of Iraq’s military was the Republican Guard, drawn from the ranks of Sunnis. Many senior Ba’athists were Shia. Perhaps Hitchens believes a draft is involuntary servitude, and so it is, but a drafted army is a remarkable unifying agent in a country so divided. Iraq's army is largely segregated along sectarian lines at present. So much for unity in our current incarnation of Iraq's army. These soldiers get at most 15 days of training anyway.
But if we must mention war criminals given a second lease on life, we need go no further than John Negroponte, once our ambassador to Iraq, he of Iran-Contra fame. (hat tip to exlrrp) Our new allies in the War on Terror are Iraq’s erstwhile 1920s Revolutionary Brigades, now styling themselves Hamas in Iraq and the Jihad Base Operation in Iraq. The Shia are enraged and puzzled to see the USA arm these old Ba’athists. In the matter of allies, ever did the USA choose stupidly: these new allies of ours will prove Iraq’s worst enemy.
The Kurdish army in the north is not as wonderful as all that, Mr. Hitchens. Iran and Turkey have already gotten a gutful of them: I predict, as surely as tomorrow’s sunrise, one or both of them will send in armies to quell the PKK and other Kurdish militias. Nor have the Kurdish militias prevented the slaughter of the Yezidis or Turkomen. Yes, we know you love the Kurds, don’t we all. "Huddled masses yearning to be free" and all that rot. Free to persecute their own ethnic minorities, you mean. To say Saddam’s military was sectarian is a genuine mistake: Saddam’s tiny clan of Tikritis were constantly obliged to ride a tiger of ethnic rivalries.
The only good thing which may be said of Saddam is this: he did not tolerate sectarian divisions in his society, he was a through-going secularist. So are you, or so you say, Mr. Hitchens. Apply the text of your own best-seller to Iraq and you will immediately see the efficaciousness of a secular power structure in Iraq.