Iraqi Praetorians

Montrose Toast ^ | 9 August 2009 | DJ Elliott

[DJ Elliott]

Iraq’s three ground services.

Iraq legally has only two ministries with significant combat paramilitary or military ground forces:

1. The Ministry of Defense (MoD) has the Iraqi Army with 14 divisions. (This is growing to 16 or 17 divisions soon with the new Kurdish additions.)

2. The Ministry of Interior (MoI) has the Federal Police (FP) and the Department of Border Enforcement (DBE) with five DBE Divisions and four FP Divisions. (The Federal Police is projected to grow to 10-12 FP Divisions as they absorb the provincial emergency police and Kurdish elements.)

Unless the Iraqi Government can fix this power balance, Iraq will be an Iraqi Army General's dictatorship in the not so distant future. That is where the Counter Terrorism Bureau (CTB) comes into play. The CTB provides the third service to help prevent coups but, in order to be credible, it needs to be large enough and deadly enough to block MoI or MoD elements and its forces need to be separate from MoD and MoI.

The law authorizing the CTB has been hung-up in the Iraqi Parliament for over a year. The CTB in its current state is funded by the Prime Minister’s emergency fund. The Iraqi members of parliament are resisting it because; it looks like a new Republican Guard. Not too surprising, since the Republican Guard was a Praetorian Guard force.