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Overdue

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It’s worth a chuckle, but the move to invite junior officers back into the Iraqi Army is an overdue one. As I understand it, the old Iraqi Army lacked a good, professional corps of non-commisioned officers. Maintaining that corps would have been absolutely critical to the creation of a new Iraqi Army, but you can’t work with what you don’t have. Given that, holding onto as many junior officers as possible (people who may have been involved in atrocities but probably didn’t order them), is very important to maintaining discipline and continuity. The Bundeswehr, after all, was not manufactured from nothing; the senior officers who served in 1955 had been junior officers between 1939 and 1945. In spite of this, the Bundeswehr was and has continued to be a model military organization. Of course, had these points been grasped two years ago, the situation today might be somewhat different.

On a related point, I am not of the opinion (now becoming more widely held) that the Iraq operation was destined to fail. I thought then and think now that a competent administration, one that understood the nature of the state, was willing to listen to expert advice, and understood the complexities surrounding the use of military force, might have succeeded. The problem with liberal hawks (and the term makes me nervous; I’m a liberal hawk, but I didn’t favor the war) is that they somehow convinced themselves that THIS administration, which was already well on its way towards combining staggering ineptitude with shameless corruption, could actually do the job.

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