[Dean's World] Dave Price: Truth And Myth On Iraq

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Posted by Dave Price:
Truth And Myth On Iraq
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1189097866.shtml


   Via [1]Glenn, Paul Bremer [2]restates the obvious, vainly clinging to
   fact and reason in defiance of an increasingly common conventional
   wisdom:

     By the time Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003, the Iraqi Army had
     simply dissolved. On April 17 Gen. John Abizaid, the deputy
     commander of the Armyâs Central Command, reported in a video
     briefing to officials in Washington that âthere are no organized
     Iraqi military units left.â The disappearance of Saddam Husseinâs
     old army rendered irrelevant any prewar plans to use that army.

   Even were that not the case, most people have apparently forgotten
   that the Iraqi Army was basically an ethnic caste system: Sunni
   officers ruling over Shia conscripts, the latter often serving
   literally with guns to their heads, as discipline was enforced not by
   professional career NCOs but by the brutal ISI intelligence agencies.
   And the pre-liberation Iraqi military was incredibly dysfunctional:
   the old IA had thousands of generals (by comparison, our own army has
   mere dozens). Advancement (if not simple survival) was dependent on
   loyalty to Saddam, rather than competence or inspired leadership. It's
   madness to think this could ever have been a responsible, professional
   military, even in the very unlikely event the toothpaste could somehow
   have been put back in the tube after all the conscripts fled.
   As Tim Blair notes in a different context, [3]some myths just never
   seem to die.

References

   1. http://www.instapundit.com/
   2. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/opinion/06bremer.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
   3. http://timblair.net/ee/index.php/weblog/turkey_frenzy1/