Can Iraq be Fixed?
Politicians dance around this question, but here's the reality: It will take U.S. troops years of work, and success is hardly a sure bet
An even bigger problem is the Iraqi police, which a senior Pentagon official estimates is basically three years behind the Army. Training has been spotty, and many units are known to be riddled with militia members. In Baghdad, Shiite death squads are deeply embedded in the Shiite-dominated police force. "When are you going to be able to send the police force into central Baghdad and not have people think they are coming to kill them?" Senator Biden asks. In Sunni areas, insurgent forces have infiltrated the ranks. At the same time, in places like Fallujah, local police face being tarred with a U.S.-collaborator label. Concerns about retaliation are ever present. "If we push them to do an obvious coalition mission," says a U.S. military trainer, "they threaten to quit."
Recruiting has been so frantic over the past two years that many of the current officers have not even been vetted. In recent months, Iraqi and U.S. officials went back and fingerprinted every police officer serving under the Ministry of Interior and began comparing them to past police records. "We have already identified approximately several thousand people currently employed by the Ministry of Interior and the security forces who come under it who have criminal records," says David Everett, a retired U.S. colonel who served as an adviser for the Interior Ministry until last April. Their crimes ranged from petty to violent. "In the very near future," Everett says, "many of them are going to be discharged."
Logistics. Training soldiers is only part of the battle. An army must also be supplied, transported, and, perhaps most important, paid. "It's much easier to teach a bunch of guys how to fight than to give them a logistics system," Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the second-ranking commander in Iraq, tells U.S. News. Supply lines between Iraqi battalions and the Ministries of Interior and Defense remain, in many cases, nonexistent. "The Iraqi Ministry of Defense is nothing but a facade for the American logistical operation," says Kenneth Pollack, a former Iraq analyst for the CIA now at Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy. "If you withdraw American support, they would be completely incapacitated in a week or so." Basics like boots and bottles of water, too, are strictly rationed, when they are supplied at all. "Trying to get something as simple as a tire and a jack from the [Defense Ministry] is a nightmare," according to one U.S. military transition team member. One Iraqi battalion in Fallujah, for example, was allotted three bottles of water per soldier per day--not nearly enough for them to conduct their daily three or four foot patrols, which can run four hours each.
Other logistical failures--like the lack of maintenance regimens or paying soldiers late or not at all--have also handicapped the Iraqi Army. A regular paycheck is a key reason recruits sign up with a force that is already viewed with suspicion. "They don't get paid, and they go home on leave and tell that to all their buddies," says one U.S. marine in the region, where marines with one regiment become so concerned about this trend that they began offering $100 in cash to every Fallujah soldier with a late paycheck.
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