The full article is curious when read closely. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/30/politics/30PREX.html It seems to me like the continuing saga of the Generals\State\CIA vs the Radicals over the need to 'backpedal' faster.
The article does indeed start with a description of an effort to take current security guards give them a few weeks training and then put them on the front lines in the Sunni hot spots. They would swell the ranks of the what is called the Civil Defense Forces which are now a small group that occasionally patrol alongside the U.S. troops - in the future they would be sent out alone. It reads to me as desultory, half hearted description almost designed to look like it will fall short.
Then comes what seems like another trial balloon: "A major goal is to rapidly increase the number of militiamen, and one option under consideration is to recruit former soldiers from the disbanded Iraqi Army, a senior Pentagon official said Wednesday."
This is the fifth or sixth time, over the last few weeks, an anonymous source says 'we are thinking of reversing our policy of eliminating the old military strata and recruiting them back'. Always just that tentative. Similar articles appear regarding recruiting the feared former secret police, the Mukhabarat (the first came in the Washington Post five days after the U.N. building was bombed).
While this may sound like just Washington insider issues, in fact I believe the issues are quite large, for Iraq and for the larger vision of restructuring the third world. It is not just a question of bringing back a few people, but a question of which social strata should rule Iraq and hence just how subservient they should be. It is a bit analogous to the question of which social groups should be rehabilitated in post-war Germany and Japan. (Likely different outcome this time.)
Paul
At 10:05 AM 10/30/2003 -0800, you wrote:
from MS SLATE'S news summary today: >The New York Times leads with President Bush's apparent order to get more Iraqi police trained pronto. During what appeared to be an Iraq (re)assessment meeting with aides yesterday, Bush "made it clear that [training] is not happening fast enough," one unnamed official recounted. As the Times describes it, Iraqis will be given a "few weeks training" then sent to the "frontlines." ....<
also from that summary: >The [Los Angeles Times's] Paul Watson gets on Page One with a piece saying that U.S.-supported militia in Afghanistan harassed and terrorized people in one village. "They stand with the Americans, and when Americans leave an area, then the militias go by another route and rob the houses," said one villager.<
------------------------ Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
