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The Mistake That Wasn't
by JONATHAN FOREMAN
The New York Post, April 25, 2004

Here's a signal that an analyst knows little or nothing about post-war Iraq: He cites the disbanding of the Iraqi army as one of the greatest mistakes made by the U.S.-led Coalition after the collapse of the Saddam regime.

Unfortunately, this widely repeated pseudo-wisdom seems to have prompted a U.S. policy reversal with Ambassador Paul Bremer's decree that senior Ba'athist officers can now join the new Iraqi army. The Coalition has undoubtedly made huge mistakes in Iraq. The "cease-fire" in Fallujah—which has given the Ba'athist klansmen there a chance to regroup while effectively conveying an impression of American weakness—is merely the latest.

But the dissolution of the Iraqi army wasn't a mistake at all.

For a start, as anyone who was there in April 2003 (and who wasn't doing their reporting from a hotel bar) could tell you, there was no Iraqi army for Bremer to disband. The Iraqi army had dissolved itself. It had ceased to exist. It was an ex-army.

That's how U.S. forces were able to take control of large tracts of the country by mid-April - including Baghdad, which was almost entirely defended by Saddam Fedayeen, Special Republican Guard units and Syrian mercenaries. Long before Bremer took over from Gen. Jay Garner as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the barracks and bases were emptied. Most of the Iraqi army had simply doffed its uniforms and gone home between March 21 and April 15 (a sensible move, given the choices - destruction or surrender - if encountered by U.S. forces).

Yet you'd imagine from much recent news analysis that some time in mid-May Bremer could have walked over to the nearest Iraqi army base, found battalions of soldiers sitting around their vehicles and asked them to keep order in the streets.

The truth is that when Bremer ordered the disbanding of the old Iraqi army on May 23, he was merely formalizing a state of affairs that already existed.

Furthermore, if an Iraqi Army had been in existence, co-opting it to police the cities of liberated Iraq would have risked disaster on every level. Those who prate about the foolishness of dissolving the army are not thinking through the political or moral implications of their position.

First of all, there is no reason to think that large swathes of that army could be trusted to work alongside its conquerors. After all, much of the "resistance" is made up of former Ba'athist officers. And the New Iraqi Army, which draws many of its recruits from the old army, has shown itself to be extremely unreliable. Much more important: Any use by the Coalition of Saddam's armed forces—the forces that put 300,000 Iraqi civilians into mass graves—would have instantly alienated both the Shia and the Kurds, i.e. a majority of the Iraqi people.

Even today, both groups fear that ongoing violence in Iraq will prompt panicky U.S. authorities to hand power back to elements with links to the Saddam regime.

This why new U.S. moves to rehabilitate former Ba'athists - like last week's appointment of former Republican Guard officers to top police posts in Kut - are so risky. And why they are also so demoralizing for those Iraqis who fought against Saddam and dream of a democratic future.

Regardless of the wisdom of this policy switch, it's still not the same thing as taking Saddam's unpurged army into our employ. Moreover, if the U.S.-led Coalition should have preserved the defeated Iraqi Army, then presumably it should also have coopted the Mukhabarat secret police and the Special Republican Guard, organizations whose efficiency at maintaining order was unquestionable.

Indeed if you're going to employ Saddam's savagely brutal coercive machinery to maintain order in Iraq, then why overthrow the regime at all? Of course, many of the war's critics always were more sanguine about the continuation of Saddam's tyranny - with its culture of torture, mutilation and murder - than the continued presidency of George W. Bush.

But for anyone who genuinely cares about the Iraqi people, the notion that Saddam's army should have been used to maintain order in Iraq is grotesque. Unfortunately, that it was a mistake not to do so has become one of those Big Lies of the war—along with the false claim that Americans were not welcomed as liberators by ordinary Iraqis—that have gained currency thanks to constant repetition by newspeople whose hostility to the Bush administration trumps any commitment to the truth.