When sovereignty does not mean
security By Aaron Glantz
BAGHDAD - A United States military helicopter
flies over the municipal building in the predominantly
Shi'ite Baghdad neighborhood Kadamiya. A US-trained
Iraqi soldier stands guard.
The guard says he
signed up in the new Iraqi army to keep Baghdad safe
from looters and thieves, but that if the Mahdi Army of
Shi'ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, who has taken on the US,
tries to take the municipal building, he will abandon
his post. He even carries a photograph of Muqtada and
his father Ayatollah Mohammed Sadik al-Sadr in his
wallet.
Such is the widespread problem the US
faces in trying to recruit a reliable security force.
Indeed, US Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted as
much on Monday, saying that the still undefined interim
government due to take power in Iraq on June 30 would
have to give back some sovereignty to US-led forces.
"I hope [Iraqis] will understand that in order
for this government to get up and running - to be
effective - some of its sovereignty will have to be
given back, if I can put it that way, or limited by
them," Powell told the Reuters news agency. "It is with
the understanding that they need our help and for us to
provide that help we have to be able to operate freely,
which in some ways infringes on what some would call
full sovereignty," he said.
In its ongoing
operations against Sunnis in Fujallah and Shi'ites in
Najaf, the US has had problems of supporting Iraqi
soldiers either defecting, or simply refusing to fight.
In the latest developments, US military command
says that its forces killed 43 Iraqis in fighting near
Najaf. About 2,500 US troops are poised outside Najaf,
where an uprising led by Muqtada began three weeks ago.
In the Sunni triangle flashpoint of Fallujah,
coalition officials said insurgents failed to meet
Tuesday's deadline to turn in their heavy weapons. No
weapons at all were turned in during the past day.
This week, US officials acknowledged that half
of its Iraqi army refused to fight when US Marines began
a massive assault on Fallujah April 5. "Forty percent
walked off the job because they were intimidated, and 10
percent actually worked against us," Major-General
Martin Dempsey said. Reuters reports the US military has
thrown 200 Iraqi servicemen in prison after they refused
to participate in the attack on Fallujah.
"It's
kind of a revolution," Majid al-Samarai, columnist for
an Iraqi newspaper and former TV talk-show host during
Saddam Hussein's regime told IPS. "It's kind of a
reaction to what the Americans didn't know about. They
made a very big mistake in Fallujah. They try to say
they were fighting foreign Arabs and terrorists like
[Jordanian Abu Musab al-]Zarqawi but they were not -
just regular Iraqis in their houses who were tired of
the occupation."
But while Arab sections of the
new US-trained Iraqi army defect in droves, the US has
still been able to count on support from former members
of Iraq's Kurdish guerrilla armies, the Peshmerga, who
fought Saddam's regime for years before allying
themselves with the Bush administration in last year's
war.
"We are not going to fight Arab people,"
says Abullah Fermande, a division commander for the
Peshmerga of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. "We are
going to stop terrorism. They may have the opposite
idea, but we are not fighting the Arabs in Fallujah and
in Najaf. We have so many friends there. But sometimes
you see the terrorists are radical Arabs and they want
to do terrible things in Kurdistan and everywhere else."
Like many of his fellow Kurds, Fermande says he
has a debt to pay to the US for overthrowing Saddam. "He
was the worst kind of dictator," the commander says,
"and now we have a real chance for freedom and democracy
in Iraq. That's something worth fighting
for."
But US officials like chief US
administrator L Paul Bremer are beginning to have second
thoughts about their hard stand against the apparatus of
Saddam's regime. Faced with increasing defections from
the Iraqi army, Bremer announced on Friday he was easing
the ban on top members of Saddam's former Ba'ath Party.
"The [interim] minister of defense informs me
that he intends to have a meeting with vetted senior
officers from the former regime next week to discuss how
best to build the new Iraqi military establishment,"
Bremer said in a televised address. "More of these
officers with honorable records - from the former army
and elsewhere - will serve in the months ahead as your
new army grows."
Bremer clearly has a long way
to go in constituting a new Iraqi army. Even before this
month's defections, the Iraqi army numbered only about
6,000, with 32,450 serving in the paramilitary Iraqi
Civil Defense Corps. That is fairly small compared to
the 350,000-member military Bremer dismissed when he
arrived in Baghdad last May.
