Posted on 06/28/2004 4:50:28 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
ISTANBUL: Iraq's new government wants to bring back more former members of Saddam Hussein's security forces to help stabilise the country, US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice says.
Rice signalled on Sunday the United States would allow the interim government's plans to proceed to try to rectify what Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has called Washington's big mistake in disbanding Saddam's army.
"The Iraqis believe that there are some people who have security training from the army and who can be brought back. Some have already been brought back," Rice said.
"They are as concerned as everybody that people with blood on their hands not be brought back," Rice told Fox News Sunday from Istanbul, Turkey, where US President George W Bush is attending a Nato summit.
"They recognise that the future of Iraq cannot be built on the pillars of the worst of the old Baath Party."
Allawi, whose government formally takes over the running of Iraq on Wednesday, wants to rehire former Saddam army members to bolster Iraq's fledgling security forces fighting alongside a US-led multinational force to stamp out guerrilla attacks.
After Saddam was toppled last year, Iraq's US Governor Paul Bremer dissolved the 375,000-strong army and imposed a campaign of "de-Baathification" to clear out the old administration that included teachers and other public workers.
Bremer has since said the policy of rooting out members of Saddam's Baath Party was unjustly applied and authorities in Baghdad have already embarked on a rehiring program in the run-up to the end of the US-led occupation.
A senior Bush administration official said Washington was leaving it to the interim government to decide what was best.
"They're going to have to strike a balance between the need for justice and the desire to draw upon expertise in important areas, including in the area of security. They will make their own decisions on these matters," the official said.
Army Lieutenant General David Petraeus, who heads an office in charge of recruiting and training of Iraqi security forces, has been reviewing some former members of Saddam's security forces, Rice said.
Rice said Iraqis are "quite willing and quite capable of vetting people, but they believe that there are probably more trained personnel that can be brought back who are not yet engaged in the security forces."
Washington blames Saddam supporters and foreign Islamic militants for guerrilla attacks, but US officials say there are members of the former government who were not loyal to the ousted Iraqi leader and who could be helpful to the country.
Bill Frist, US Senate majority leader and a member of Bush's Republican Party, said he believed it was a good idea to rehire former Saddam security force members but the problem lay in vetting.
"It makes sense but how you implement it is the challenge," Frist told reporters.
The RG likely makes up much of the so called "Millitants" or "insurgents" in the Sunni Triangle, including Fallujah. The rest are mostly foreigners brought in to be killed by American firepower (of course that's not the way they might put it :) ).
Well, there's one other little difference as well. The Waffen SS fought like rabid tigers. The Republican Guard fought like French conscripts.
As for a mistake? At the least, they will be integrated into a new structure after having been out of it for at least a year - not directly transferring their own structure and alliances into the new military. If they're going to build alliances to undermine the military, they'll have to start at a much lower level and expend much more effort to do so.
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