WI: Iraqi military not disbanded?

What if, rather than disbanding the Iraqi army and security forces, which is believed to have directly lead to the current Iraqi insurgency, Coalition Provisional Authority Civil Administrator L. Paul Bremer instead works to integrate the army and police forces into new de-Baathified organizations, arresting only key Baathist military elites?

I might do a timeline on this in the future, by the way.
 
The grass is always greener in the other TL.

Might have worked.

Or the occupational goverment might have had far less legitimacy than OTL, with a bunch of mass murdering former Saddam buddies in the military and police forces, leading to a differant insurgency, and a TL with WIs such as "WI: Iraqi military disbanded?".
 
What if, rather than disbanding the Iraqi army and security forces, which is believed to have directly lead to the current Iraqi insurgency, Coalition Provisional Authority Civil Administrator L. Paul Bremer instead works to integrate the army and police forces into new de-Baathified organizations, arresting only key Baathist military elites?

You'd have deserters forming a resistance.

The embodied military would be as inefficient as it was before the war.

The people who in OTL criticized the government for disbanding the military would in ATL be criticizing the government for not disbanding the military, leaving a hard core of supporters of the old regime in power and armed.
 
Bremer makes a good whipping boy for the Iraqi meltdown because he was arrogant, clueless, and executing really nutty orders from DC regardless of the facts on the ground. He didn't care. He was going home with fat checks in his pocket and carte blanche.

HOWEVER, blame needs to go much further up the food chain as to why things went swirly after toppling the Ba'ath government.

IMO the main issues were:


  • No post-war planning for reconstruction that weren't cash cows for KBR, et al ripoffs of the American taxpayer that did the Iraqis next to zero good. The Iraqis knew that the reconstruction projects were mostly for the comfort of foreign nationals and bitterly resented it.
  • Not enough boots on the ground for the "Allies" to maintain order
  • Not enough training/emphasis on civil affairs for Allied soldiers
  • Iraq needed politically neutral blue helmets, not Americans trying to maintain order, because civil affairs and peacekeeping are their main focus.
If I were Paul Bremer, I would have definitely kept paying the Iraqi army and police, purged a few of the more notorious bastards and made sure the rest were under a tight leash to (a) keep a lot of guys employed and busy and (B) prevent sectarian violence and looting of the cultural treasures.
 

whitecrow

Banned
I could be wrong, but weren't ex-Saddam's army soldiers (under leadership of an officer form Saddam's military) sent by themselves to clean out Fallujah in the early years of the occupation and ended up joining the insurgency?
 

stalkere

Banned
I could be wrong, but weren't ex-Saddam's army soldiers (under leadership of an officer form Saddam's military) sent by themselves to clean out Fallujah in the early years of the occupation and ended up joining the insurgency?

This one is one of those stories that depends on how you want to interpert what you are saying.

Please recall that the kind of people that led the insurgency in Fallujah would be the kind of people that would have shot one of Saddam's officers on sight, war or no war. Old hatreds die hard in that area.
This is about like saying, "Oh, I heard the Black Panthers were rioting in Atlanta, and a Klansman went down and joined up with them." Not impossible, but seems kind of ASB to me, on the face of it.

A lot of the post war Iraqi Police (IP) and Iraqi Army (IA) were associated with US forces who basically fed and clothed them from US and US-captured supplies.

Other IP and IA units were handled directly by Iraqi officials paid by the Transitional Government (or whatever it was called that week -seemed like it was getting a name change every other week for a while) those units might or might not get paid or fed or supplied, depending on what the official felt like doing.

So - your story about Fallujah and IP/IA units deserting and joining the insurgents? In some cases, guys from the non US-associated Units did go down, listen to the insurgents and say the equivalent of "Fukitall, they ain't going to pay me or take care of me, I'm going to the other side."

Can you really blame them?

At least in one case I heard of, there was an insurgent killed, whose name was on the rolls of an IA unit, but had never actually been there - the OIC had padded the rolls with fraudulent names to get more money for himself.

But the IA unit associated with the US forces - the folks who were properly fed, led, and taken care of, did a good job, from everything I heard.

Yeah, they weren't as good as our guys, from what I heard from Marines and Army that were there. Brave in about the same proportion as our guys, just need some better training and equipment, for the most part.
 
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