The Way Out

The Pentagon has a new plan for training Iraqis. Will it work?

By Douglas Waller and Sally B. Donnelly Monday, Jan. 31, 2005

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    Perhaps the most daunting task facing the U.S. advisers will be persuading their charges to overlook religious, ethnic and geographical divisions. Many Iraqi soldiers are loyal not to their country but to regional leaders. In the northern part of Iraq, for instance, where ethnic Kurds have enjoyed relative autonomy for more than a decade, there is little chance that local Peshmerga militias will take orders from army units under Baghdad's control. "Not now, not ever," snapped a top official in the Kurdistan regional government. "Not even if the commander was a Kurd."

    The U.S. leadership notes that it has confronted similar challenges in training a new army in Afghanistan, the model for the advisers strategy the Pentagon is taking to Iraq. But to some military experts, especially veterans, plans to embed U.S. advisers more deeply into the Iraqi military and security forces also have an ugly historic parallel: Vietnam. "We had people embedded in Vietnam units at every level down to the company," says an Army veteran who is now a Pentagon official. But when those soldiers were left to fight on their own and "the North Vietnamese rolled into the South, those units melted away." If the U.S. hopes to get out of Iraq, a new generation of advisers will have to prove that this time will be different. --With reporting by Andrew Butters/Arbil and Charles Crain/Mosul

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