The National Intelligence Estimate said Iraq is a bloody mess unlikely to improve anytime soon. The Government Accountability Office says Iraq is not making any political or military progress.
And an independent examination of the Iraqi police shows a force that is so far gone, it might need to be scrapped altogether.
An independent commission established by Congress to assess Iraq’s security forces will recommend remaking the 26,000-member national police force to purge it of corrupt officers and Shiite militants suspected of complicity in sectarian killings, administration and military officials said Thursday.
The commission, headed by Gen. James L. Jones, the former top United States commander in Europe, concludes that the rampant sectarianism that has existed since the formation of the police force requires that its current units “be scrapped” and reshaped into a smaller, more elite organization, according to one senior official familiar with the findings. The recommendation is that “we should start over,” the official said.
This is a mess of the highest order. The Iraqi police force, which presumably is responsible for helping keep local communities safe and orderly, is reportedly corrupt to its core and overrun by Shiite militias. We could disband the police force, but when we disbanded the Iraqi Armey in 2003, it generated a backlash that helped create the insurgency. The prospect of putting 26,000 well-armed, angry young men out of work, at our request, is, shall we say, unappealing. For that matter, Iraq would be left with no police force for a few years while we tried to build a new one from scratch. (Commission members surely know this, which suggests they believe the current police force really is that bad.)
We could also try to retrain the police, and remove sectarianism from the ranks, but we’ve tried that before and it hasn’t worked.
Looking at just the past few weeks, this is, of course, the latest in a long line of revelations that Iraq is not improving and our policy isn’t achieving positive results.
Kevin Drum recommends we “take stock” of where we are today.
Pretty much everyone has lost confidence in Nouri al-Maliki, though there’s no replacement in sight who seems like a better bet. The police force is so corrupt that the best advice the Jones commission can offer is to disband it completely and start over from scratch. And the Iraqi army, after three years of intensive training designed by one Gen. David Petraeus, has a grand total of six battalions capable of operating on their own.
In other words, except for the fact that Iraq has a dysfunctional government, a dysfunctional police force, and a barely functional army, things are going great.
I can’t wait to see how Crocker and Petraeus spin this into an argument for staying another four years.
And how Bush is going to justify throwing another $50 billion at a crisis in which all of his proposed solutions have failed.