An interview with journalist Martin Smith, the maker of a new PBS
documentary on Iraqi militias, about how the U.S. strategy of
Iraqification could backfire.
The full article is here:
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/20...ith/index.html
Salon - There's a disturbing scene in your film, in which Iraqi soldiers
go on a raid with U.S. troops and you catch the Iraqi soldiers talking
about how the weapons they found are "child's play," not a real arms
cache. Can you describe that scene?
Smith - We went in on this raid with the Iraqi army in Mahmoudiya, which
is in the so-called triangle of death south of Baghdad. We were going
into a Shiite neighborhood, and we were told, although the Iraqi army
wasn't told, that we were going to raid what they call a "JAM cache," a
Jaish al-Mahdi, or Mahdi Army, arms cache. When we got there, a
cameraman and I, we were both filming; we didn't have an [Arabic]
translator with us because our translator had not been able to join us
because his brother had been kidnapped and tortured. So without a
translator, we were just filming what we could. And it was pure instinct
of Tim Grucza, the cameraman, to film these guys as they were muttering
off to the side. We had no way of knowing what they were saying. And
when we got back to the editing room here and we had it translated, we
discovered that what [the Iraqi soldiers] were talking about, at this
raid, was that the weapons the soldiers had collected were just "kids
stuff," and that the real stuff was at [their cleric's] place. They
muttered on about how this was just child's play or kids stuff, and they
didn't tell the Americans anything about this. It clearly shows that
they're not really pulling with their U.S. buddies.
Salon - In instances like that or in instances where there's Mahdi Army
infiltration, are we arming the militias?
Smith - Well, that's the fear of one of the principal advisors of the
Ministry of the Interior, who said that his greatest fear is that all we
have been doing is training and equipping the Iraqis to fight a civil
war. It certainly wasn't our intent to do that, but in practice people
have received training who have then gone back and fought with their
militia.
Salon - So do you think trying to "stand up" a national army at this
point might be a futile effort?
Smith - It's the centerpiece of our policy, but as I've said, trying to
get people to form a national police force in the middle of a civil war
is a very difficult, if not impossible, task. It's like going into
Kentucky during our Civil War and getting people from the North and the
South. If you put them in a unit together, you expect them to fight
together in the interests of what?
It's just hard to imagine how you train sectarianism out of people when
the situation in the country is so insecure that people feel,
legitimately, that they need a militia to protect their neighborhood.
People don't trust, don't have faith, in a neutral army. The Sunnis fear
it. It's a pretty discouraging situation, I'm sorry to say.
We have another scene in the documentary at the [police] training center
in Jordan. Back in December [U.S. and Iraqi authorities] opened this
massive training center in Jordan. They figured they couldn't open a
police training center in Iraq because of safety issues, so they opened
it in Jordan and they brought all these trainers in from all over the
world. And we have these scenes of them trying to indoctrinate Iraqis
with patriotism, with loyalty to the national entity, and to identify
with Iraq and not first and foremost with their sect or their militia. I
guess the only way to describe it is to say it's embarrassing at best to
see this guy, kind of like a football coach, trying to get these people
to pledge allegiance to their own flag. You have to see it to believe it.
