Re: Which Iraqi Army?
- From: Islander <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 01 Sep 2006 08:17:33 -0700
Rita wrote:
The New York TimesWhich takes us back to the question of when this becomes a civil war.
September 1, 2006
Editorial
Which Iraqi Army?
Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, has a problem. His power
depends on two armies. One is Iraq’s national army, trained and
supported by the United States. The other is the Mahdi Army, a radical
Shiite militia loyal to Mr. Maliki’s most powerful political backer,
Moktada al-Sadr.
This week, open warfare broke out between these two armies. Mr. Maliki
can no longer put off making an essential choice. He can choose to be
the leader of a unified Iraqi government, or he can choose to be the
captive of a radical Shiite warlord. He can no longer pretend to be
both.
The issue came to a head in the southern city of Diwaniya. The
fighting began when the Mahdi Army took to the streets to protest the
arrest of several Sadr loyalists. At one point, according to an Iraqi
general, Mahdi fighters killed a group of Iraqi soldiers in a public
square. After hours of fierce fighting, Shiite politicians worked out
a cease-fire with Mr. Sadr. But no one sees this as an isolated
incident or imagines it will not soon be repeated.
Iraq’s national army is the very fragile reed on which White House
hopes for an eventual American withdrawal now rest — as President Bush
made clear yesterday in a speech about Iraq in which he heaped praise
on Mr. Maliki but painted a picture of the Iraq war that had only the
most tenuous connections to reality. The Iraqi Army was already
demoralized and fragmented. Its soldiers and officers, including some
courageous Sunnis who have defied the insurgency to stand with their
Shiite and Kurdish countrymen, cannot be expected to go on risking
their lives indefinitely unless Prime Minister Maliki stands up to Mr.
Sadr’s attacks.
But thus far, the prime minister has conspicuously stood aside,
recently denouncing Washington for supporting an Iraqi Army attack on
a Sadr stronghold in Baghdad. Mr. Maliki’s refusal to go after the
main stronghold — Sadr City — helps explain Baghdad’s continued high
level of violence despite the prime minister’s endlessly repeated
announcements of a security crackdown in the capital.
The underlying political reality is that Mr. Maliki owes his job to an
alliance between his own Islamic Dawa Party and Mr. Sadr’s faction.
(If you see a parallel to the way Hezbollah has shielded itself from
being disarmed by the Lebanese government, so does Mr. Sadr. A few
weeks ago he rallied tens of thousands of his supporters in Baghdad to
cheer Hezbollah’s rocket attacks against Israeli cities.)
The White House and the Pentagon keep assuring Americans that despite
the obvious problems, the Iraqi Army is becoming increasingly capable
of taking over basic defense responsibilities. But evidence continues
to mount that it is not.
In Anbar Province, the western heart of the Sunni insurgency, army
desertion rates in some units have run as high as 40 percent. In
Maysan, in the Shiite southeast, 100 Iraqi soldiers defied orders to
deploy for Baghdad, in part out of concern they would be asked to
fight Shiite militias. Days before, a former British base in Maysan
that had been turned over to the Iraqi Army was overrun by looters as
Iraqi soldiers and the police stood watching.
Instead of standing up to take over the defense of Iraq, the Iraqi
Army is in danger of crumbling. Now, government-backed Shiite
militiamen have publicly killed Iraqi soldiers and fought an army unit
to a humiliating draw. And Mr. Maliki still hasn’t decided where his
military loyalty lies.
.
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