Stop Training Iraqi Troops? Stephen Biddle argues that “Iraqization” won’t work the way “Vietnamization” was meant to:
In a people’s war, handing the fighting off to local forces makes sense because it undermines the nationalist component of insurgent resistance, improves the quality of local intelligence, and boosts troop strength. But in a communal civil war, it throws gasoline on the fire. Iraq’s Sunnis perceive the ‘national’ army and police force as a Shiite-Kurdish militia on steroids… to them, the defense forces look like agents of a hostile occupation. And the more threatened the Sunnis feel, the more likely they are to fight back even harder. The bigger, stronger, better trained, and better equipped the Iraqi forces become, the worse the communal tensions that underlie the whole conflict will get.The creation of powerful Shiite-Kurdish security forces will also reduce the chances of reaching the only serious long-term solution to the country’s communal conflict: a compromise based on a constitutional deal with ironclad power-sharing arrangements protecting all parties. A national army that effectively excluded Sunnis would make any such constitutional deal irrelevant, because the Shiite-Kurdish alliance would hold the real power regardless of what the constitution said.