Posted on 05/06/2004 3:08:52 PM PDT by Eurotwit
Is Saddam Hussein's old army coming back into the fold?
THE good news for the United States is that Fallujah, the city at the heart of Iraq's insurgency has, for the time being, fallen strikingly quiet. American forces have lifted their three-week siege and withdrawn beyond the town's perimeter. Many of the 100,000 residents who had fled have come home. Americans and Iraqis who were fighting each other have agreed to create a “Fallujah brigade”. Insurgents who hours earlier were shooting at Americans happily accepted American offers of cash, radios and uniforms.
Many Americans—and Iraqis—in Iraq worry that these short-term gains have come at the cost of rehabilitating the old security apparatus that the Americans have travelled so far to crush. But already America's generals are touting Fallujah as a model for pacifying other rebellious towns. “They feel like it's a solution that could work elsewhere,” says the marines' commander, General Jim Conway. “There are obvious advantages to it.” An Iraqi general said that the deal over Fallujah could serve as a precedent for Iraq's other most bloody-minded cities: Ramadi, Kufa, Najaf, Karbala, Basra, Mosul and even for “beloved Baghdad, Iraq's beating heart”.
Most of the rebels, with whom this tentative but so-far-successful accommodation had to be made, served in Saddam Hussein's vast security forces and were disenfranchised overnight a year ago, when America's proconsul in Iraq, Paul Bremer, stripped them of their income and jobs. Mr Bremer has now also softened his deBaathification order, which barred senior members of Mr Hussein's regime from power. This week he also ordered that many prisoners be freed.
America's Defence Department and Central Command report on the security situation. See also the Coalition Provisional Authority, the US State Department's Iraq updates and the UN website's Iraq section.
Not only does this bring back many of Mr Hussein's men into public service. It also authorises a new militia at a time when militias were supposed to disband. In Fallujah, the Americans forgot their previous demands that, as the price for peace, the rebels' heavy weapons should be handed over, along with foreign jihadis and those who had killed and mutilated four American private security men who had been ambushed in the town. Fears that the jihadis' flight would trigger a new wave of bombings were confirmed on May 6th when a suicide car-bomb killed six people in Baghdad, ending several weeks of respite in the capital.
The deal over Fallujah makes many Baghdadis feel edgy. They fear that the insurgents will now go elsewhere in search of new targets. A rebel Shia cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, who led a wave of uprisings in Shia cities in the south a few weeks ago, will be encouraged too, though American forces this week began to flush his Mahdi army out of Karbala and another town in the south. Still holed up in Najaf, Mr Sadr says that he has learnt a lesson from Fallujah: “if you want to be friends with America, you must fight it.” The revival of a Sunni Arab militia has given Kurdish and Shia militia commanders good cause to reconsider their earlier promise to dissolve and join a new army.
Iraq's new American-appointed defence minister, Ali Allawi, is furious. His plans to create a united Iraqi army from the 50,000 strong Kurdish pershmergas (guerrillas) and the two religious Shia militias—the 10,000-strong Iranian-trained Badr brigade, which owes allegiance to the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) party, and the 1,500 militiamen loyal to the Dawa party—are in tatters.
Disunity beckons If it is deprived of a united army, Iraq is more likely to split down ethnic and religious lines. Mr Allawi's efforts to recruit from the 400,000 dismissed members of Mr Hussein's armed forces or to tempt them on-side with offers of a pension and employment scheme have been undermined. Now Mr Hussein's former soldiers may be able to choose between a career in Mr Allawi's forces and in those run by former Baathist generals.
Mr Allawi has 35,000 troops under his control. They could expand to 80,000 by mid-May, when his ministry takes over the 45,000 local levies of the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps. He reckons his lightly-armed forces could grow to 125,000. Mr Allawi wants to deploy most of them on Iraq's porous borders but is also setting up a “special task force” division, 10,000-strong, that could be sent to flashpoints such as Najaf, to keep Americans out of the fray.
But Mr Allawi and the new interior minister, Samir Sumaidy, are struggling with the divided loyalties of many Iraqis, especially those serving in the revamped army and police. When Sunni and Shia insurgents rebelled last month, even the previous interior minister's brother, who ran Basra's police, switched sides.
By contrast, the Fallujah brigade has cash, arms and discipline. It may be only 600-strong but it can call on a network of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of like-minded men, mostly ousted soldiers from the old army, within the Sunni triangle around Baghdad. The deal over Fallujah suggests that some of the insurgents care less for now about ending the occupation than winning recognition as America's partners. Many senior Iraqi officers already hail the deal as the first step on the path to replacing Iraqi civilian rule with Iraqi military rule, which is more likely, they argue, to bring about the stability which America craves. “Democracy will never take root in Iraq,” says a former Baathist general. “Only the Iraqi army can cow the population into acquiescence.”
Mr Allawi, an Oxford don before he became defence minister, has refused to bring the Fallujah brigade into his fledgling army. He will not, he says, rehabilitate Republican Guard generals whom he blames for the deaths of 300,000 Iraqis, mostly Shias, killed in 1991 during the suppression of the uprising after the first Gulf war.
Mr Allawi is strongly backed by anti-Baathist Shias in the soon-to-be-dissolved Governing Council (GC), who share his fear that a belt of subversive ex-Baathist brigades could soon encircle Baghdad. They fear, too, that when an interim Iraqi government takes office in July, the old and new armies could clash. Military coups, after all, punctuated Iraqi history throughout the last century. “No other institutional force is more powerful than the former army,” worries a Shia on the GC.
The defence minister worries that President Bush may be drawn to the idea of stability in Iraq, even if that means military rule. Iraqi democrats are talking nervously about the restoration of “Saddam Lite”.
Looks like a plan.
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