Shawn Brimley and Colin Kahl, analysing Maliki’s SoI crackdown in a Los Angeles Times op-ed, suggest a chilling analogy:
It is obvious where this road might end. The last time tens of thousands of armed Sunni men were humiliated in Iraq — by disbanding the Baath Party and Iraqi army in May 2003 — an insurgency began, costing thousands of U.S. lives and throwing Iraq into chaos. Yet Maliki and his advisors risk provoking Iraq’s Sunni community into another round of violence.
Marc Lynch, for his part, sees a quandary:
What if that battle is joined, but the ‘former Awakenings’ (‘the once and future insurgency?’) choose not to turn those guns against their American ‘friends’ but concentrate exclusively on the Iraqi government. Which side does the U.S. support? The Awakenings movement which it has built and cultivated, or the Iraqi government which it has built and cultivated? Could get messy.
Judging by what Petraeus said last week in a McClatchy interview, the answer seems clear:
“We’re not going to walk away from them, and as I said, Prime Minister Maliki committed to taking care of them. [...] I do think it is somewhat understandable that the government struggles to hire former insurgents for its security forces or for its ministerial positions… But this is how you end these kinds of conflicts. That’s why they call it reconciliation. It’s not done with one’s friends, it’s done with former enemies.”
Paying off your enemy is always a huge gamble, particularly when you’re fighting someone else’s war. Whatever happens, the least likely outcome is probably the one Maliki is banking on: that the Sunni volunteers will quietly accept their fate, throw down their weapons and slink back to irrelevance.
How many times will the tired old canard of the US’s “dissolving of the Iraqi army” led to the rise of the insurgency?
What Bremer did, was in fact recognize what was already a reality. The Iraqi Army dissolved itself as hundreds of thousands of Shiite conscripts left in droves. The Iraqi military upper echelon was almost exclusively non-Shiite, being comprised mostly of the Sunni.
The Iraqi army was brutal towards the lower end of the military stratus, and it wasn’t surprising at all that the Shiites left rather than to serve in despised subservence to Sunni officers.
One of the greatrest acheivements with the present day military is the new officer academy, and the new reliance on non-com officers to make the difficult calls on the field.
Yes the US blew a chance to curry favor with the disbanded men, offering a few chickens a week would have been a simple enough measure to keep them from picking up arms for hire. But that’s crying over spilled milk.
What also has to be understood in all of this, is that the Kurds (and many shiite) viewed the disbanding of the Iraqi army as a sign that there was no return to the past. If you think that an insurgency developed due to the breaking up of the army, just what do you think would have happened when disatisfied Kurds and Shiite took to the streets fighting the “new/old” Iraqi army and the US that supported it?
There are many ways to look at the scenario of Iraq’s dissolved armed forces. Perhaps…..just perhaps, US military training has indeed affected some of the officers that have graduated from the academy, and perhaps, just perhaps…they will be less brutal than what was common place before the fall of Saddam.