The Ministry Of Militias Won't Take US-Trained Police

Here's one of the very worst of the literally (not figuratively) thousands of mistakes the Bush and Blair administrations has made in Iraq.

The Interior Ministry hasn't deployed a single US or UK trained policeman in three months - the new police in that time have been militia members, according to a new report in the Guardian.

Iraq's interior ministry is refusing to deploy thousands of police recruits who have been trained by the US and the UK and is hiring its own men and putting them on the streets, according to western security advisers.
The move is frustrating US and British efforts to build up a non-sectarian Iraqi police force which would not be infiltrated by partisan militias.

The disclosure highlights growing US and British concern about the role of militias in sectarian killings, and their links to senior Iraqi politicians. "You can't have in a democracy various groups with arms - you have to have the state with a monopoly on power," Condoleeza Rice, the US secretary of state, said at the end of her two-day visit to Baghdad yesterday.

"We have sent very, very strong messages repeatedly, and not just on this visit, that one of the first things ... is that there is going to be a reining in of the militias... It's got to be one of the highest priorities."

This is suddenly their cry de jour. But it wasn't always like that. The London Times reported two days ago that:

Militiamen from an Iranian-backed force were deliberately recruited by Britain to join the new Iraqi security services after Saddam Hussein was overthrown, the Government has admitted.

John Reid, the Defence Secretary, disclosed in a Commons written answer to the Plaid Cymru MP Adam Price that it had been official policy to welcome the Shia gunmen. “Following the end of the conflict in Iraq, the Coalition Provision Authority sought to reintegrate militia members into civil society,” Mr Reid said. “This process included members of the Badr organisation, formerly known as the Badr Corps, among others.”

The Times doesn't bang the gong, but the Bush administration, as primary partner in the CPA, was at the heart of the move to recruit militiamen into the security forces, on the basis that the bulk of the insurgency were Sunnis and "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". They believed that after fighting in Najaf during 2004 had been halted by the intervention of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, "Moqtada's militia is generally marginalized, and there is little to be gained from taking a military role", as one intelligence officer put it - and acted accordingly. That went well, didn't it?

But they were warned at the time and continuously since, by experts and pundits alike, from both the left and the non-Bushevik right. They didn't listen. So don't let them pretend this is a bright new idea they are having or that they had no active hand in the current situation. Ask them why they created the situation in the first place instead.

Any mainstream journalists out there with the cojones to put that question to Condi and Jack?