Training an Iraqi Army

Bloomberg has an interesting article on the problems that have been plaguing efforts to establish an Iraqi national army (link here). Among these problems is the absence of a monolithic Iraqi identity, and the tendency of military groups to split along sectarian lines. When the members of a military give allegiance to opposing factions above the national entity they are charged with serving, the result can be great instability and an increased risk of civil war.

Leslie Gelb, former assistant secretary of state and former president of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, said most of the militias pay first allegiance to their ethnic or tribal group.
"It's not an Iraqi army," said Gelb, who visited Iraq for 10 days earlier this year. Kurds are loyal to Kurds, Shiite militias resembling "mafia operations" run the south, "the central region has the insurgency, and Baghdad is all mixed up," he said.
Patrick Lang, former chief analyst for the Middle East at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said Iraq's different ethnic groups "will not serve together" in national army units.

Tensions caused by these divisions are also heightened by the differing visions held by Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis for the future of Iraq. Sunnis fear that their interests will not be represented fairly in the new government, and that they will be excluded from the benefits of oil revenues. Sunnis favor a strong central government and equal distribution of oil revenues among all the regions of Iraq, since Shiites control the most oil-rich provinces in Iraq and could easily exclude Sunnis from the benefits of oil should regional governments overpower the central government. Kurds are agitating for small central government and highly autonomous regional governments in order to maintain a large degree of independence from the rest of the country. Shiites also favor small central government and autonomous regional government, so they will benefit from their control of oil-rich areas and so as to preclude the ascension of a strong minority-controlled central government as was the case under Saddam.

As I said before in my article "Another Flawed 'National Strategy'", the real test for the Iraqi people will be if these sectarian divisions can be overcome through more inclusive political processes. Failure to do so could result in a split between warring factions, made even more deadly by a fractured Iraqi army that could devolve into numerous well-trained and well-armed militia-like forces. By training a large Iraqi army while bitter sectarian divisions continue to destabilize the country, Bush is risking even greater bloodshed when American troops pull out. Especially since Bush has made virtually the only condition of America's departure the training of these forces (as opposed to the reconciliation of differences between factions), it is even more likely that the power vacuum left by America's pull-out will be filled with the violence of a fractured army. If Bush insists on staying in Iraq, he would increase the chances of peace and stability in Iraq by emphasizing negotiation instead of increasing the potential for large-scale violence.