In a bloody ISIS attack on an Iraqi Army base just north of Fallujah on September 21, upwards of 500 government soldiers perished or disappeared, fleeing into the marshlands, the woods, or to the next base camp four miles away. Few were left behind alive, surrounded by militant fighters who by all accounts were supposed to be less equipped, less trained, and less organized than Iraq’s professional fighting force.
But the Iraqi security forces, into which American taxpayers poured some $25 billion over the course of a decade, had in the span of a summer, crumbled.
While pro-war critics blame the Iraqi military’s failures on the current administration for leaving the country too soon, American veterans and journalists who spoke with TAC say the army was corrupt, incompetent, and unmotivated from the beginning, and that top U.S. officials papered over this inconvenient fact for years in order to protect their commands and maintain public support for the U.S. intervention.
Kind of like our own generals that never were...
In a late 2013 treatise unfortunately titled, “How We Won in Iraq,” Petraeus said,
Over time, we and our Iraqi counterparts achieved slow but steady progress in building the capabilities of the Iraqi Security Forces. … Progressively, over the months and years that followed [the surge], the coalition turned over responsibility for security tasks to Iraqi forces until, at the end of 2011, Iraqi elements assumed all security tasks on their own, with only a residual U.S. office of security cooperation remaining in Iraq.
“Claims by Petraeus, Dempsey, and other U.S. generals of Iraqi effectiveness were always exaggerated or false,” said (Ret.) Col. Doug Macgregor, an author and Army consultant who served in the first Gulf War. “The generals were simply cultivating their Bush administration sponsors in pursuit of further promotion.”
I would find every general that said grossly positive things about the Iraq military and have them fired.
Others argue it was the corruption in the ranks, beginning at the top and filtering all the way down to the lowliest private, that sabotaged Iraq’s security forces. Commands were bought and sold, and subordinates were fleeced. According to a recent interview with author Patrick Cockburn, the going rate for a colonel’s position in the army is $200,000—$2,000,000 to be a division commander. Then one spends the rest of the time demanding grease from everyone else.
“They have no interest in fighting anybody; they have interest in making money out of their investment,” Cockburn told Tariq Ali in late September.
Lt. Col. Danny Davis traveled to Iraq in 2009 as a chief of a transition team with direct experience working with Iraqi commanders and recruits. “When I was sent out to train this battalion I had no idea who (commanders were) and how they got there. That was, ‘internal business,’” said Davis.
Shipments of gasoline, spare parts, and weapons would be pilfered before they reached their intended destinations, he recalled. Ethics were an anomaly. “All the skimming and graft and all the rest—a corrupt army can’t fight and won’t fight,” added Hoh.
A Marine Corps colonel who did not want to be identified because of his current status as a deployed active-duty officer, said he served multiple tours in Iraq and on the last, as a team leader for an Iraqi Army (IA) advisor team from 2007-2008.
“Based on that last tour with the IA, I’m not surprised what is going on in Iraq. The IA (battalion) I was with was considered one of the best, and were still lousy,” he wrote to TAC in an email.
Leaders looked out for themselves first by making side deals involving food, water, and even electricity if they were sitting on top of a generator. I got the first two battalion commanders I worked with fired for corruption that involved taking money out of soldier’s salaries and the rape of local Sunni women by the Shia soldiers. I understand what we consider corrupt in our culture was not in theirs, and I was learning to live with it. But I told them if it starts directly involving the welfare of their men, then I would come after them.
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