Wall Street Journal REVIEW & OUTLOOK Making Baghdad Safer America should let Iraqis restore order to Iraq. Friday, June 13, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
Baghdad regent L. Paul Bremer announced yesterday that the U.S. will soon begin training a new Iraqi Army, and it's certainly about time. The rebuilding in Iraq is still suffering--and the U.S. casualty rate is growing--because of our failure to let Saddam Hussein's opposition join the fight before the war. The result has been that U.S. troops have had to bear all of the burdens of security in that large country, while also hunting for WMD and pursuing Saddam if he's still alive. Conventional wisdom blames all of this on the Pentagon's decision to fight the war "on the cheap." But we don't see how more troops would have made much difference. When Baghdad fell, the task on the ground suddenly changed from one for which American soldiers are ideally suited--war fighting--to policing cities and hunting down scattered Baathist diehards, duties Americans lack the language skills and local knowledge to do well. "Sitting ducks," Iraqi National Congress (INC) leader Ahmed Chalabi called them when he stopped by our office this week. Saddam is alive, he says, and has offered a bounty for American heads. Mr. Chalabi argues-- persuasively--that the answer to the security problems is the speedy creation of a new Iraqi security force to work with American soldiers. Iraq's old police forces are corrupt and full of Baathists, but there are many other Iraqis ready to serve. After returning to northern Iraq early this year, Mr. Chalabi cobbled together 700 fighters to form the Free Iraq Forces, which were flown down to Nassiriya to help American troops during the war. By all accounts they did a bang-up job of restoring order and disarming the bad guys. "In one day," U.S. Army Colonel Ted Seel, the INC's Centcom liaison told us, "they accomplished more than an American battalion could have in two weeks. Being able to communicate with the people is absolutely critical. Americans can't do that." The FIF could have been the backbone of a new Iraqi security force. But with the war over, and State Department officials again calling shots at the coalition reconstruction office, the FIF was forcibly disbanded instead. This is the kind of short-sightedness that State and the CIA have shown all along in Iraq. Foggy Bottom resisted Baghdad's liberation for years and its Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs all but refused to disburse the nearly $100 million that Congress appropriated for the INC, even as war loomed. As for Langley, the CIA figured it didn't need an Iraqi opposition, predicting Baathist and Republican Guard defections that never occurred. In April we published excerpts of leaked minutes detailing apparent attempts by NEA staffers to undermine the INC. "Ms. [Yael] Lempert stated that NEA would appreciate any assistance [the Office of Inspector General] could provide with NEA's desire to 'shut down the INC,' " read one passage. Where is Ms. Lempert today? She's in Baghdad, working on political reconstruction, instead of facing the Congressional scrutiny that her apparent attempt to skew an audit and thwart the will of Congress deserves. The larger, more sensitive issue here is how quickly to turn over a whole host of other responsibilities to Iraqis, including that of actually running a government. If Mr. Bremer thinks the time is not yet right to set that larger process in motion, we're willing to defer to his judgment. But we can't see a downside in enlisting more Iraqi help in policing streets and oil rigs, or in hunting Baathists. Take it from former Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Forces Chief of Staff Ehud Barak, who knows something about the perils of military occupation: "Even a second- or third-grade Iraqi police force is better than anything the Americans can provide," he told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York this week. We hope America's postwar casualty rate doesn't have to rise any higher before U.S. authorities in Iraq reach the same conclusion.
