Cambio de régimen y desmovilización.

Para muchos la disolución del Ejército Iraquí una vez derrocado Saddam Hussein está entre los principales errores de los ocupantes. Hoy, las sucesivas rebeliones árabes vuelven a poner en el tapete el rol de estas fuerzas en momentos de crisis.

The Realist Prism: Regime Change and Demobilization in Iraq and Beyond

By Nikolas Gvosdev | 22 Jul 2011

Soldados del nuevo Ejército.

Most experts believe that one of the most catastrophic mistakes made during the U.S. occupation of Iraq was the decision to disband the Iraqi armed forces in May 2003. The question is not merely of interest to historians and those writing "after-action" reports on the Iraq invasion. After all, other Iraq-style regimes -- most notably in Syria, Libya and North Korea -- are likely to fall in the near future. In all three states, the armed forces are part and parcel of the longstanding political order, and there will be those arguing for their complete dissolution in order to sweep away the last remnants of the "ancien régime."




Starting from scratch with a new army "free from politically compromised personnel," as Florence Gaub puts it in a recent study of post-conflict militaries in Iraq and Lebanon, may be a noble task in theory, but difficult to achieve in practice. A new Libyan democracy, for instance, will need the skills and institutional memory that current supporters of Moammar Gadhafi will bring. Conversely, if the Libyan rebels were to exclude them from any new arrangements, this would not only slow down the process of reconstruction but even possibly sow the seeds for counterrevolution.

In Iraq, there were plenty of warnings that demobilizing the regular army, in addition to dissolving the security and intelligence apparatus of Saddam Hussein's regime, would have consequences. A pre-invasion briefing had bluntly stated, "Cannot immediately demobilize 250K-300K personnel and put on the street." Many believe that the decision to do so directly fueled the devastating insurgency that crippled efforts at any rapid reconstruction of Iraq and changed the very perception of the Iraqi operation from a swift victory into a stalemated quagmire.

In 2007, however, Ambassador L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer defended the decision, arguing that "recalling the army would be a political disaster because to the vast majority of Iraqis it was a symbol of the old Baathist-led Sunni ascendancy. . . . We were right to build a new Iraqi Army." By this argument, while the decision to dissolve the Iraqi army might have proven very painful and costly in the short run, it laid the long-term foundations of a new military.

But did the dissolution of the Saddam-era Iraqi army result in a more balanced officer corps, one reflecting the division of the population into 60 percent Shiite, 20 percent Sunni and 18 percent Kurdish? And are the rank-and-file soldiers actually uncontaminated by service in the pre-2003 military?

The answer, according to Gaub's report, appears to be no. Strikingly, Gaub notes that an estimated 70 percent of the current officer corps of the Iraqi army, and every general officer, was on active duty during Saddam Hussein's rule, and that "the same is true, though to a lesser extent, for the enlisted personnel." Indeed, Iraq's Law on Military Service and Pensions creates "a legal basis for the return of a significant number of former military." Contrary to the protestations of Washington officials that largely Shiite conscripts would not return to the barracks if mobilized, it appears that many former soldiers were prepared to resume their service. In turn, the "new" Iraqi officer corps is still largely drawn from the Sunni community.

Gaub observes, "The Iraqi military . . . has re-emerged as an armed force largely resembling the old Iraqi armed forces . . . containing a rather large share of Sunni Arabs in its officer corps and Shiite Arabs in the rank and file." Only in the staffing of high-ranking posts in the Ministry of Defense -- where the numbers are 56 percent Shiite, 26 percent Sunni and 7 percent -- Kurdish is there closer parity with the actual demographic makeup of the country. This may change, at some point in the future, as the selection of the next generation of junior officers appears to be more in line with Iraq's demographics. But for now, the decision to dissolve the Iraqi army did not radically transform the makeup of the military that replaced it.

Part of the reason is that the commitment to creating a new army for Iraq simply fell by the wayside -- the "old wine" of the pre-invasion army was poured into the "new wineskins" of the post-Saddam military. Starting in April 2004, stringent de-Baathification policies meant to exclude all former officers at the rank of colonel or higher were relaxed. Driven by a "need for experienced personnel, as well as the need for Sunni Arabs," successive Iraqi governments further reversed or altered elements of the original order disbanding the military.

The spirit of that order was, according to Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, "to show all the Iraqis that we're serious about building a new Iraq." Yet the fact that today's Iraqi military, while not a carbon copy of Saddam's army, is still largely populated by veterans raises the question of why we could not have remobilized the "old" Iraqi army in May 2003, with senior officers suspended with pay while being investigated and vetted? We cannot argue with any certainty whether the twin Sunni and Shiite insurgencies that wracked Iraq in 2003 and 2004 would have been completely avoided, but perhaps fewer disgruntled Sunni officers would have lent their skills and experience to the anti-American fighters, and fewer unemployed Shiite recruits might have been available to the Mahdi Army.

Part of the problem was a gap in our understanding of what role the army ought to play in Iraqi society. Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority's senior adviser for security, Walter Slocombe, wanted to downsize a large military establishment to produce a lean defensive force capable of dealing with external threats. In contrast, Gen. John Abizaid argued that Arab states had traditionally maintained large armies "to keep angry young men off the street and under the supervision of the government." Perhaps, in keeping with this second objective, a slower transition to a more professionalized Iraqi military might have been in order.

Rarely do policymakers have easy choices in post-conflict situations. In Iraq, the fear was that compromising with elements of the old order would fundamentally preclude a new and better one from emerging. That led to an ill-thought-out decree that unnecessarily complicated the occupation without leading to any major changes. Hopefully, this lesson will not be forgotten when similar challenges again confront us in other post-conflict scenarios.

Nikolas K. Gvosdev is the former editor of the National Interest, and a frequent foreign policy commentator in both the print and broadcast media. He is currently on the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College. The views expressed are his own and do not reflect those of the Navy or the U.S. government. His weekly WPR column, The Realist Prism, appears every Friday.