About Saddam's Army

Did we or did we not disband Iraq's army after we knocked off Saddam's regime? And was this a mistake? The conventional wisdom is that we let a perfectly good army walk away and this contributed to the insurgency we are fighting today.

Lieutenant General Dempsey answers the question this way:

I have reflected on that often, and I found myself -- not to dodge the question, but I find myself seeing some benefits and some disadvantages in either course we may have followed.

Had we not disbanded them, we probably would have had the opportunity to handpick what we wanted a bit better because they wouldn't have dissipated. Perhaps the weapons storage facilities, the ammunition storage facilities would not have been subject to looting, perhaps the bases in which they lived would not have been subject to looting, all of which we've had to go back and reconstruct.

On the other hand, you know, as the Shi'a majority began to gain its political power, as it sees as somewhat of an entitlement now after several centuries of being the dominated majority, I think that it would have been almost impossible to leave that army in place because it was clearly seen as a -- not only a vestige of the past, but would have been seen as a threat to the government.

And so -- you know, I think that probably the disbandment was appropriate. It may have done -- we could have done it better, but I think at the end of the day it probably had to be done. That's where I am on it now.

So how does this answer answer those questions?

First, saying we disbanded the Iraqi army still doesn't directly address the first question. Yes, we disbanded the Iraqi army, but it was a formality. It wasn't there. That's my memory of the war. Recall that we urged the Iraqi army to go home during the war so we wouldn't be tied down taking their surrender.

I'd really love to have the question asked as "was it a mistake to send home the Iraqi army units sitting around after we defeated the Iraqi regime?" In Tommy Franks' book, he relates how Washington was nervous about map symbols of Iraqi divisions near the Iran border near the end of major combat operations. We sent out units to those spots, found nothing, and so deleted the map notations of enemy units, thus making Washington less nervous.

General Atkenson (USA, Ret.) answered this question back in January 2004 in a manner that bolsters my memory of events (I actually ran across this article four months ago while cleaning out some old journals):

What happened to the Iraqi army last April? Did it stand and fight? Not really. For the most part it sought small engagements of American supply trains in which it could inflict casualties and disrupt the momentum of the U.S. assault to some extent. And then what? The Iraqi army evaporated. There were no large pockets of prisoners to round up, as in the 1991 war. Most of the Iraqis simply went home, taking their individual weapons with them.

But Dempsey didn't get asked the question I want asked. But he does address the far more important question of whether we should have kept the Baathist military (regardless of whether we could have). On this, Dempsey backs up my judgment. As I've argued:

I shudder to think of what could have happened in spring 2004 during the twin jihadi and Sadr uprisings if Baathist-dominated Iraqi army units had been around. We could have had a real Sepoy Mutiny and would have faced Iraqi army units defecting to the enemy. We would have wished that the Iraq army had disintegrated as they did in fact.

Dempsey sees some potential advantages if those "disbanded" soldiers had not looted armories and bases. And maybe we'd have been able to recruit (selectively) from these people and gotten higher quality recruits for the new army.

But the drawbacks of maintaining the former Saddam army could have crippled our war effort. And there is no guarantee that the soldiers we wouldn't have selected for the new army wouldn't have gone on to loot bases and steal weapons anyway.

Saddam's army ran away. And thank Goodness for that.