Perle Cites Errors in Iraq, Urges Power Transfer

"either way, unless they are waiting for salaries paid for by the us taxpayer, they are bidding their time.. this is why i say, it is most urgent to disarm iraq"

Agreed. The remnants of the Iraqi army staged some riots about two months ago, demanding money from the US or they would begin attacking our troops. Diplomacy aside, we'd be IDIOTS not to believe that those remnants aren't keeping their promise and that at least some of them haven't hooked up with foreign jihadis to acheive the commmon goal of killing Americans (note they hardly go after anyone else except other Iraqis.)

LIke you, I don't believe the Iraqi people have the right to keep and bear RPGs. If they REALLY just wanted us OUT, they'd stay down, stay quite and let the transition occur so they can come out when we leave.

{those remnants aren't keeping their promise and that at least some of them haven't hooked up with foreign jihadis to acheive the commmon goal of killing Americans }

this is clearly happening. iraq is becoming (according to some reports) a clearing house for every islamist anti-american, anti jew organization in the middle east. what this means is that, we just do not have the resources to maintain security and protect the borders of iraq. what purpose is the american occupation serving if iraq remains unstable? if the territorial integrity of iraq cannot be guaranteed now, what happens when 2004 election politics requires us troops to be brought home? the best solution now is to provide a security guarantee against foreign (read: iranian) invasion and pull back to a secure defendable area. democracies do not exist in the world of the arabians. why all of a sudden one is supposed to be plopped down on top of iraq and function in a normal manner is truly an astounding jump from the reality of war to the fantasy of the us state department.

We managed to make our deal with the Iraqi army, much of which remained in their barracks and did not join the battle against us. For a time after the war, they remained in their barracks, and continued to be paid, until Bremer arrived. Shortly after his arrival, he disbanded them and put 350,000 armed young men on every street corner in Iraq.

This strikes me as being a serious error. Having captured close to a billion dollars in cash, we had the cash to continue paying them, but whats done is done.

Now we are in the process of recruiting from this same pool of young men for our new Iraqi army, but we will only be taking a small percentage of them. Nonetheless, we need to accelerate this process and field an Iraqi force as quickly as possible to seal the frontiers and guard the oil infrastructure. They should preferably have Americans folded into their units for at least a couple of years, and their command structure should be integrated with our own.

The best way to carry out an effective occupation of Iraq is to field an American army comprised of Iraqis. Sooner is better, but until we can field this force we will have no choice but to tough it out. Bringing in more Euro rear-echelon folks isn't going to help anything. Handing it off to the UN won't help either, they will just make deals with the very people we need to kill. Imagine a West Bank the size of France. Imagine an Arafat with a million man army.

As for Perle's remarks that we should have prepared an Iraqi opposition, thats easy to say now, but the fact is that there was never going to be an Iraqi opposition while Saddam was sitting in his palace. There have been dozens of attempts to build an opposition within Iraq and they all ended up in the boneyards we are uncovering.

We are at the beginning of probably two years of guerrilla warfare, and at the beginning of a 10 year process to civilize Iraq. We should not kid ourselves, and we should ignore any politician who pretends otherwise. He's just trying to tell us what we want to hear, but if we pull out too soon it will be worse than had we never gone in.

marron,
points well made... however, western powers building arab armies has never proven to be successful. you would be right, say in south korea. Lawrence of Arabia might explain this better than I. since you mentioned the disputed territories, (and i would include beirut for the purpose of comparison) street fighting with small arms is prefered to large army tactics, (utilizing power vs. manuver strategies) by the arabians. think about it. when was the last successful large arab army formed? would you agree with me that the iraqi army should have been destroyed during the war and not allowed to accept a deal to sit out? would George Patton have agreed?

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