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The Myth of the Iraqi Baathist Army Endures……

      


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Whenever
things heat up in Iraq, as they are these days, most Western and Arab media types and ‘analysts’ fall back on an old and mistaken argument. That argument is: that disbanding the old Baathist army was a big mistake by the Bush administration. Oh, yes, if only the old Baathist army ‘was not disbanded’. Yet it is arguable how and when the old army was ‘disbanded’ and by whom.

During
the start of the last Iraq war in 2003, the Iraqi army vanished. Its men just shed their military uniforms and melted away. They deserted rather than defend Iraq’s borders. They did not even defend their capital Baghdad, which lay open for the coalition invaders (or liberators, if you will). The army that tormented its own native people could not face foreign forces, sadly a typically common Arab phenomenon.

The
old Iraqi army vanished, deserted at the start of the war, long before Paul Bremer arrived in Baghdad. The myth that Bremer made a mistake by “disbanding” it continues. The myth is dusted up periodically by media and analysts and pundits and many Arab apologists, then shelved until the next Iraq crisis. 

Yet, with or without Bremer, would the Shi’as and Kurds of a new Iraq have accepted continued domination by Saddam Hussein’s Baathist army? The same army that was so good at gassing and repressing them?
In fact Bremer just formalized a fact that existed: the old Iraqi army had deserted, refused to fight, and effectively disbanded itself.

Cheers
mhg

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