Eliminating Success During Eclipse II: An Examination of the Decision to Disband the Iraqi Military
Abstract
Military planners for Operation Iraqi Freedom assumed that the coalition would be greeted as liberators and that the Iraqi Army would be able to assist in reconstruction efforts. . Much of Iraq did treat the coalition as liberators, but the appreciative feeling dissolved when the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) removed Baathists from consideration for employment in the new Iraq, and when the Iraqi Army was dissolved. Within two weeks of arrival in Iraq, the head of the CPA, Paul Bremer, negated both of the planning assumptions. The arguments "for" and "against" dissolving the Iraqi military both had merits and consequences. Dissolving the Iraqi military removed one of Saddam's tools of tyranny and would allow the new Iraq to begin with a more ethnically balanced security force. Conversely, eliminating the Iraqi military threw 400,000 veterans into unemployment, left the coalition undermanned, and changed the Iraqi liberation into an occupation. Security is the foundation for support and stability; therefore 150,000 U.S. ground forces had little chance of occupying and stabilizing a country of 25 million people. The symbol of the Iraqi Army to the Iraqi people was misinterpreted by the CPA and the United States underestimated the volatility of disenfranchising 750,000 Baathists and 400,000 Iraqi soldiers. Making a new army for Iraq is still on-going; six years after the war began. It took two-years (2004 - 2006) to re-make the 40,000 Iraqi soldiers that military planners assumed they would have immediately available to them at the conclusion of the offensive. The 2007 troop surge would not have been necessary if at least one-eighth of the Iraqi Army would have been retained.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 26, 2009
- Accession Number
- ADA511061
Entities
People
- Robert S. Weiler
Organizations
- Marine Corps University