What, we have to wear uniforms too?

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2007 by Charles Peters

Two news stories provide hints of the state of today's Iraqi army. One, by Greg Jaffe of the Wall Street Journal, describes how Iraqi army Brigadier General Falah Hassan Kinbar "barely escaped a kidnap attempt by the Mahdi Army, a radical Shiite militia," during which "more than a dozen of the moderate Shiite general's own men betrayed him." An American colonel told Jaffe that the general is "one of the few military commanders up here who refuses to violate his own principles and work with the Mahdi Army. That's why they want to kill him." Brigadier General Kinbar says, "I want to do my duty. But I am very sure my own government will abandon me." He wants the Americans to help him escape and relocate. "Any country," he pleads. "Any country."

In the other story, by the Associated Press, the good news is that the Iraqi army is enjoying recruiting success. The bad news is how they're doing it. Recruits are being promised that they will not be sent far from home.

"They want to serve Iraq," an American colonel explains, "but they wanted to do it in the local area."

Just how a national army can function if its soldiers can't be sent to all parts of the country is not explained. But, before the change in the recruiting rules, "U.S. officials were finding that after joining and going through training, many new Iraqi soldiers would quit after learning they were to be assigned to a post far from their homes."

It might help our own Army increase its number of recruits if they were told they could stay near home in Alabama or Wyoming or wherever and not have to go to a place called Iraq. But you have to suspect that our soldiers who have been sent to Iraq wonder a bit about the dedication of their Iraqi counterparts, for whom American lives are being risked far from home.