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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Orcastraiter who wrote (159512)	3/23/2005 5:05:23 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

You right wingers alternately use the excuse that either the men in the army were forced to serve by Saddam or they were loyal to Saddam...depending on the argument you're trying to make! Well of course the Iraqi Army had plenty of both under Saddam, the trick is trying to sort one from the other. If you simply hired the army wholesale you would know that you had plenty of Saddam loyalists, if not for ideology, then because once a man gets enough blood on his hands working for Saddam, he has no choice but to stick with that side, or face the vengeance of his victims' kin. Saddam was extremely paranoid about the possibility of a coup from the officer corps, not without reason. The corps was seeded with his trusted agents who would often pretend to start a coup. They would wake suspected officers up in the middle of the night, and say "Brother, it's a coup. Are you with us?" If the answer was 'yes', they shot the officer. These men are in the insurgency now, do you really think having them on government payroll would be an improvement? They could do a lot more harm from inside. When Allawi says it was a mistake not to rehire the army, I respect his opinion, but it scarcely means that the rehired army would have been trustworthy or usable quickly. Its very existence might have made the Shia bolt, seeing their oppressors put on top again. The decision was not an easy one, and if Bremer had gone the other way, you might be blasting him for putting Saddam's killers in positions of power again. 'Ha! the US says it's for democracy, but look who they give the power to! Same group of Sunni thugs as before! No wonder the South of Iraq is rising in revolt!'