Promoted by Steven D.
The other day I commented on the first in a stunning series of reports in the NYT, by Michael Moss and others, about the debacle in Iraqi policing created by the Bush administration. The second report today practically beggars description.
It details the attempts by British and U.S. forces to train and oversee effective police forces, even while many units that were scraped together hastily became corrupt and then thuggish outfits. The report devotes much attention to Basra, which was supposed to be an isle of calm in Iraq. Now it is an utter mess.
Gradually, the corruption increased. Much of the city came to be controlled by sectarian groups, including the Iranian-influenced Badr Organization and the more radical Shiite militia controlled by Moktada al-Sadr, the Iraqi cleric who clashed with coalition forces in April 2004.
Evidence arose that the police began acting as the militia of these groups to carry out sectarian violence and enforce a fundamentalist creed….
Then, starting last spring, the accumulating evidence in a string of assassinations pointed to the senior police officers at Jamiat. The officers acted so brazenly that the American advisers dubbed them the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, for the havoc they created, Mr. Villanova said.
The police chief in Basra, Gen. Hassan Sawadi, complained publicly last summer that he could not trust most of his men, and that corruption was rampant, but that he was powerless to fire even the worst offenders….
On Saturday, Majed al-Sari, an Iraqi Defense Ministry adviser, said in an interview that violence in Basra had gotten so bad that murders were now running about one every hour.
In the long term, creating police commando units to fight insurgents around Iraq turned out to be one of our most disastrous post-war policies. The commandos were recruited from former military personnel and heavily equipped. Falah al-Nakib, then the Iraqi interior minister, states “The recruiting was done by U.S. officials who didn’t know who they were hiring.”
But even as the special police units fought successfully, the American and British officials who helped create them remained worried….
“We saw them as a good thing, something with which to take on the insurgents,” said Andrew Mackay, a British brigadier general who worked for General Petraeus. “But you could see that if we didn’t get this right, it would quickly be something that the Minister of Interior, depending on who he was, could turn into his own little army.”
Mr. Nakib said that before he left his post in April 2005, he met with Mr. Rumsfeld in Baghdad and told him the Shiite political parties who were coming into power that summer would hijack the commandos for use as their own militia.
“I warned him that there would be problems,” said Mr. Nakib, now a member of Parliament.
Steve Casteel, an American security expert who served as Mr. Nakib’s adviser, said Mr. Rumsfeld nodded and said, ” ‘We understand your concerns.’ ” Mr. Casteel said Mr. Nakib raised the same alarm with other officials, including Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top commander in Iraq.
As David Manning (UK Foreign Policy Advisor) said to Tony Blair before the war about the Bush administration, “They may agree that failure isn’t an option, but this does not mean that they will avoid it.” And what Mr. Nakib warned Rumsfeld about is precisely what happened last spring when the Interior Ministry was taken over by the Shiite military leader, Bayan Jabr.
James Steele, a retired United States Army colonel who also helped develop the special police as a member of General Petraeus’s team, said he did not regret their creation, but rather saw their misuse by sectarian groups as one of the biggest threats to the American plans in Iraq.
“That is more dangerous in terms of our strategic success than the insurgency,” he said. “If this thing deteriorates into an all-out civil war our position becomes untenable. Who the hell are you fighting?”…
The power of sectarian rifts in Iraq to influence police operations gained international prominence in November. American soldiers discovered a secret prison run by Interior Ministry officials in Baghdad where 173 malnourished prisoners, mostly Sunni Arabs, complained of being tortured. At the time, several Iraqi officials said the police working there were members of the Shiite Badr Organization.
If anything, the NYT article gives too little emphasis to these secret prisons, which are said to be quite numerous. By last July already it was being widely reported that the Interior Ministry had been turned into an instrument for sectarian violence.
Still, if you were wondering why the new government of Prime Minister al-Maliki has not yet been able to find an acceptable candidate for Interior Minister, consult today’s report in the Times. To whom would you be willing to hand over the power to brutalize the nation?
Crossposted at Inconvenient News.
The generals may say that the thuggish police forces are a threat to American interests. However, the ethnic cleansing taking place in Iraq is every bit in the interests of the neocons. Ultimately, what American forces couldn’t do, “tame” a population, Iraqi “police” forces will do, through ethnic cleansing.
Can’t remember the writer’s name at the moment, but in a diary here it was pointed out that the point was to keep Iraqi oil off the market, at least for now. I would submit that keeping it off the market, because of civil war, is a suitable secondary goal to exploiting it.
So, Bush initially failed to take timely action to establish police forces, and another report details the number of warnings that US officials neglected, as well as inaction, which led to rise of militias: White House and Pentagon officials “ignored a stream of warnings from American intelligence agencies about the mounting danger posed mainly by two powerful Shiite militias, the Badr Organization and the Mahdi Army.” Now, the US conclude that militias are the primary security concern in Iraq and more dangerous than the Sunni Muslim insurgency. So, the Iraqis can’t trust the police for security and militias are killing the people, and US forces are fighting insurgents and militias and terrorists, so who is providing security to the people?
from the police, the militias, the Iraqi army, the U.S. army, the insurgents, and the sundry killers&spoilers, then in many places they don’t have any protection at all.
This article from the Guardian (which I wrote about here) gives the impression that what started a few years ago by various neighborhoods to protect themselves, by barricading themselves in with fortified entrances, has transformed some Iraqi cities into something like medieval (European) towns with their warring factions controlling small sections of the urban area.
As Baghdad splits up into no-go areas for the Iraqi police, the danger is that the groundwork is being laid for a civil war in the city. If sectarian violence increased, the separate mosque defenders could start coordinating, turning the city into a jigsaw of no-go areas, like Beirut in the 1980s. They could also make common cause with the insurgents and turn against the Americans.
“This is our biggest problem, the militias and the untrustworthiness of the official security forces. It could easily turn into fiefdoms, each area with its own militia,” warned Adnan Pachachi, a secular Sunni who serves as interim speaker of the new parliament.
by Patrick Cockburn, reacting to the absurdly rosy picture Blair gave during his hurried, heavily protected visit to Iraq today.
A frustrating aspect of writing about Iraq since the invasion is that the worse the situation becomes, the easier it is for Tony Blair or George Bush to pretend it is improving. That is because as Baghdad and Iraq, aside from the three Kurdish provinces, become the stalking ground for death squads and assassins, it is impossible to report the collapse of security without being killed doing so.
The importance of the NYT series on policing is partly that the indifference Bush has shown to restoring security in Iraq provides an essential backdrop to his prolonged fantasy about how things are improving day by day there.
you should takes all these posts that you have written on this issue and somehow condense to present as a letter to the editor to newspapers across country so that American people can see through your words what is really going on. So they can see it and feel it through your words. this is all very sickening and disturbing, words which don’t even convey what i am thinking and feeling when i read this. but, americans need to see that this is the reality.