Interesting idea for Iraqi army....

From The New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/international/middleeast/02ARMY.html?th=&pagewanted=all&position=

U.S. Considering Recalling Units of Old Iraq Army
By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT

Published: November 2, 2003


ASHINGTON, Nov. 1 ? Some American military officers in Iraq are pressing to reconstitute entire units of the former Iraqi Army, which the top United States administrator in Baghdad disbanded in May. They say the change would speed the creation of a new army and stabilize the nation.

Proposals under consideration would involve identifying former Iraqi officers and weeding out any still loyal to Saddam Hussein. Those who pass the vetting could then track down the troops who had served under them in order to re-assemble complete companies and battalions rapidly.

"We feel we could contact a midlevel officer ? say, the rank of captain or major ? who knows where all the members of his unit are today," said a senior military officer at the occupation's military headquarters in Baghdad.

The talks are at an early stage and do not represent an actual plan. At a news conference in Baghdad on Saturday, the American administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, spoke merely of the need to welcome back former members of the Iraqi Army into the small replacement army now being formed.

But the talks tacitly acknowledge that some officers view Mr. Bremer's decision to dismantle the defeated 500,000-member Iraqi Army as a mistake, one that has contributed to the instability and increasing attacks against United States forces in Iraq.

Mr. Bremer's decision, which his advisers say was made after deliberations with senior Pentagon, White House and other administration officials, was a defining moment in the American-led occupation.

Pentagon policy makers continue to say the Iraqi military had to be dismantled before a democratic Iraq could be built, and they point out that the force had already melted away under intense attack.

But the decision reversed the approach of Mr. Bremer's predecessor, Jay Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general who advocated paying members of the former Iraqi Army as a way to keep their units intact for possible construction tasks and to prevent them from turning against the Americans.

Senior military officers in Iraq and Washington say they are now considering ways to make up for lost time and lost opportunities, in order to put an Iraqi face on the occupation forces' efforts to plug the security gaps in volatile areas of the country.

"We don't see a solution without co-opting the former military to some degree," said a senior military officer in Baghdad who has reviewed what needs to be done to field a new Iraqi Army quickly.

Former Iraqi officers chosen for service would be carefully screened to make sure there are "no hard-line Baathists tucked up in there" or others who had taken part in acts that might warrant war crimes prosecution or otherwise were unworthy to serve, one military officer said.

The talk of reformulating some full units of the Iraqi Army began "in the last couple of weeks," a senior officer said, and were under way during the visit to Iraq by Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, who returned to Washington on Monday.

"There is no prejudice against hiring officers of the former army if they have clean records," Mr. Wolfowitz said when asked about the proposals.

Military officers said their discussions preceded statements this week from the White House and Pentagon about revamping and accelerating plans for putting Iraqi security forces on the streets of Baghdad and other areas where American forces and Iraqi citizens have been attacked.

Under one possibility described by a senior officer in Baghdad, former army transportation and engineering units might be reconstituted first. Known in the military as combat support and combat service support, such units perform important logistical missions, and the American effort in Iraq has required the mobilization of tens of thousands of reservists for those duties.

Iraqi combat units, in particular Republican Guard and tank units, would not be among those reconstituted, officers said. But armored and infantry soldiers of the former Iraqi military would be allowed to apply for retraining and membership in the new army, an effort led by Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton, previously the United States Army's chief of infantry training.

The first 700-man battalion of the new Iraqi Army took the field in early October under the command of Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno of the Fourth Infantry Division, based in Tikrit.

Mr. Bremer said Saturday that about 60 percent of the enlisted soldiers and all of the sergeants in the new Iraqi Army had been members of the former army.

Mr. Bremer said that "we have always said they are welcome to join" the 27 battalions that eventually are to make up the new Iraqi Army.

"We are also welcoming former army members into the civil defense corps," he said. "I don't know if we have figures on what percent are from the army, but I'm sure it's a majority. They've also been encouraged to join the police, the facilities protection service and the border police."

Mr. Bremer's decision to disband the army caused an early clash with General Garner, the man he replaced in May.

"It was our view that we needed to pay the army and get them back to work as quickly as we could," said Jared Bates, a retired three-star Army general who was General Garner's operations deputy. "You didn't want them on the other side of the fight."

But General Bates said the view of some civilian policy makers at the Pentagon was, "Why in the world would we pay an army we just spent blood and treasure to defeat?"

Walter B. Slocombe, the civilian in charge of rebuilding Iraqi security institutions, defended Mr. Bremer's decision on grounds of principle and practicality. He said planting democratic roots in Iraq required disbanding an institution that was hated by the population as an instrument of Mr. Hussein's control.

He said the decision was also dictated by facts on the ground because the Iraqi Army no longer existed as a coherent force and bases were unusable.

"The Iraqi military under Saddam Hussein was a part of the system, and when the major fighting ended, say, in early April, major maneuver operations ended, the old army simply disintegrated," Mr. Slocombe said. "Everybody went home. And so the old army, which we formally dissolved as an institution, no longer existed when we did it."

He said that even after Baghdad fell, the Iraqi military could not have been invited back to barracks because "the degree of the looting in military installations in Iraq is really hard to imagine."

He continued: "They didn't just steal stuff that was not nailed down. They stole the toilet fixtures, and they stole the pipes and the tile in the latrines."

But Mr. Bremer's announcement contradicted the plan as described at an official Pentagon briefing on March 11, a week before General Garner's departure for Iraq.

"One of our goals is to take a good portion of the Iraqi regular army ? I'm not talking about the Republican Guards, the special Republican Guards, but I'm talking about the regular army ? and the regular army has the skill sets to match the work that needs to be done in construction," a senior Pentagon official said at the briefing.

"So our thought is to take them and they can help rebuild their own country," he said, adding that their tasks would not be combat but "things like engineering, road construction, work on bridges, remove rubble, de-mine, pick up unexploded ordnance, construction work."

Using the Iraqi army in that way, the official said, "allows us not to demobilize it immediately and put a lot of unemployed people on the street."

Mr. Bremer's decision also collided with recommendations from a group of former Iraqi military officers recruited last year by the State Department to advise the government on how to carry out the occupation.

"It was a big mistake," Muhammad al-Faour, a former major in the Iraqi Special Forces who headed the State Department project's defense working group, said in a telephone interview. "You put half a million people with their families, with their experiences, on the streets, and if just half a percent of those people turn against you, you're in trouble."