BAGHDAD — Officers who served in Saddam Hussein's military forces have been flocking to join the Iraq Army.
U.S. officials said that over the last month, thousands of Saddam officers have applied to join the Iraq Army. They said after a screening most of the applicants were accepted.
If you ask me, other than the top level of the upper echelon of officers, they should have kept the vast majority of them. This is one area I must be critical of the Administration. They dropped the ball on this one.
3 comments:
Well, when you have one of our own guys rolling a grenade in our officer's tent it makes it hard to trust even the lowest levels at that time. I think at the time we would have had large scale sabotage from them. Now that time has past the chance of that is lower, but still possible.
This is not a simple question. Former officers in this article can be "Nobusuke Kishi." He was a fascist bureaucrat, but he was a man in need for the postwar reconstruction in Japan. He escaped the Tokyo tribunal, and he played a major role to strengthen the US-Japanese alliance when he became the prime minister later.
Of course, it is difficult to trust Baathist officers innocently.
By the way, I quoted from your blog in my latest post on Iraq.
AOCS,
I think you are right that some of the Baathists would have been involved in sabotage. But if you paid them well and made them one of the honorable professions in the society, most of them would have formed a nucleus against those people and rooted them out.
Shah,
Sometimes you have to weigh the risks versus benefits. Evidently, Kishi provided more benefits than he posed risks.
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