What if instead it was incorporated into whatever new regime was being set-up post invasion. Would that butterfly away ISIS? Provide any sort of stability south of Kurdistan?
It sounds good, and might have worked.
On the other hand, very many of those lower rankers had also been used as bully boys to keep the Shi'a in line. I know this, I was there in 2003; I worked with the units processing the EPWs, and with many Sunni and Shi'a civilians who gave me the same info (though vastly differing attitudes towards the practice).
So what happens when you tell the Shi'a to accept this? What happens when you tell the existing grunts to accept Shi'a recruits into their units?
It simply isn't as uncomplicated as you're trying to make it. There are potentially catastrophic pitfalls involved.
In retrospect, it is unlikely to have been worse, but it might have been as bad. It might not have been politically acceptable to the Shi'a to begin with.
Would a military-wise Apartheid, namely deploy the old Sunni forces to the Sunni neighborhoods, and the new Shia one to Shia neighborhoods, work? As in, not triggering sectarian violence nor a civil war?
Suddenly disbanding the Iraqi army was indeed a huge mistake, but it's also a mistake to believe that everything would have gone well if it had been kept together. To put it mildly, I'm highly skeptical that a Shia government and Saddam's army would be able to accept each other.
To what extent was the Iraqi Army intact as an organization when it was officially disbanded?
I seem to recall hearing that most of the Army's personnel had deserted during or shortly following the invasion. If this is accurate, it's more a question of "re-forming the Iraqi Army" rather than "not disbanding the Iraqi Army".
The units i knew anything about were horribly understrength, with lots of desertions. Many of the deserters turned themselves in later, once they realized we weren't going to hold them. Their morale was utterly shot, and to be honest I think the majority wanted nothing further to do with the army, they just wanted to be processed out -- maybe they thought they'd eventually be persecuted unless they got processed out and disappeared back home, maybe they were still just shocked. I dunno.
I see the middle way here as keeping the officers cadre intact while they gradually demobilized the conscripts. Keeping the leaders under discipline and responsible for weapons accountability, behavior of the ranks, and their welfare would be the criteria by which the officers would be judged by the masters.
Discharge of the ranks would be as slow as practical to keep the men under supervision of a sorts, and busy cleaning up the streets or other war damage. This keeps a number of the men in a semblance of gainful employment, paid, and allows the sorting out of the leaders cadre for establishemnt of a smaller army.
The Shia/Sunni problem cant be solved by simple actions. That requires incredibly adroit diplomacy and leadership within Iraq. Something it is unlikely the US, or at least the Bush administration of those years could provide.
To what extent was the Iraqi Army intact as an organization when it was officially disbanded?
I seem to recall hearing that most of the Army's personnel had deserted during or shortly following the invasion. If this is accurate, it's more a question of "re-forming the Iraqi Army" rather than "not disbanding the Iraqi Army".
The units i knew anything about were horribly understrength, with lots of desertions.
The interviews show that while Mr. Bush endorsed Mr. Bremer’s plan in the May 22 meeting, the decision was made without thorough consultations within government, and without the counsel of the secretary of state or the senior American commander in Iraq, said the commander, Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan. The decree by Mr. Bremer, who is known as Jerry, prompted bitter infighting within the government and the military, with recriminations continuing to this day.
Mr. Powell, who views the decree as a major blunder, later asked Condoleezza Rice, who was serving as Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, for an explanation.
“I talked to Rice and said, ‘Condi, what happened?’ ” he recalled. “And her reaction was: ‘I was surprised too, but it is a decision that has been made and the president is standing behind Jerry’s decision. Jerry is the guy on the ground.’ And there was no further debate about it.”
This WI touches on the fundamental problem with Iraq. There really isn't an Iraq to begin with! The country is just lines drawn up by the British that lumped together a bunch of different Arab tribes with different takes on Culture and Islam and in a few cases, different religions, and in the case of the Kurds they aren't even Arab.
Iraq without a cruel dictator like Saddam forcing the damn thing together is going to blow up no matter what you do. It's as simple as that.
Would a military-wise Apartheid, namely deploy the old Sunni forces to the Sunni neighborhoods, and the new Shia one to Shia neighborhoods, work? As in, not triggering sectarian violence nor a civil war?
This WI touches on the fundamental problem with Iraq. There really isn't an Iraq to begin with! The country is just lines drawn up by the British that lumped together a bunch of different Arab tribes with different takes on Culture and Islam and in a few cases, different religions, and in the case of the Kurds they aren't even Arab.
Iraq without a cruel dictator like Saddam forcing the damn thing together is going to blow up no matter what you do. It's as simple as that.
That's how Bremer defends his most widely criticized decision to this day - there was barely any army left, ergo the "disbanding" was academic and its effects are overrated. It's a fair enough argument.
But....meh. I'm inclined to believe that Bremer was a fuckup and incompetent hack, so I don't completely buy that. They were more concerned about "the specter of Saddam" than about -ahem- keeping the country stable.
No. It really isn't. Iraq as a nation makes a perfect ammount of sense, the pieces of the empire that it was built out of where always heavily economically tied together with the centre at Baghdad.
An incompetent fuckup sometimes gets it right. In the case of the Ba'athist Army (and that's exactly what it was, the tool of the Ba'athist regime; it is a horrible misnomer to call it the "Iraqi" Army), leaving it intact would have immediately wrecked any chance for Shi'a-Sunni cooperation. Plus, it was utterly wrecked as an effective organization -- leaning on a broken reed just isn't a good plan.
If you want political stability in Iraq, there are three choices:
1) split it up like the British should've done (better yet, they should've pulled out and just let the inhabitants sort it out). They'll fight it out until they've established borders.
2) set up one side or the other to run a brutal authoritarian regime which holds down the other side by force. That's what Saddam's regime was, and it was ugly and wrong and dangerous, but it worked.
3) hope that a feeling of national cohesion and sectarian-political tolerance magically takes hold (it won't). *
Bush's failing is that he didn't recognize the impossibility of the third, wouldn't challenge the first, and couldn't abide the second.
* Note: I typed "sectarian-political" because in the region, the two are inextricably entwined. Islam has been a "political religion" since it's inception. Christianity was too, in the Later Roman Empire days and long after, but has lost a large part of that linkage. Thankfully.
I honestly think that this assumes far too much that Iraq is "destined to fall apart", more than anything else Iraqs turmoil can be attributed to the absolute collapse of infrastructure and services post invasion leading to a situation where destitution and poverty were running rampant and where sectarian conflict is a certainty. National cohesion isn't going to come magically, but making steps to make sure that everyone's fed, that the lights are on for as much of the day as is possible, and that there's running water working 24/7 would do a hell of a lot to make the people of Iraq satisfied with the new status quo. And yes, that would probably be horribly expensive, but it would certainly mean that the house of cards is in the very least glued together and attached together with scotch tape.