(no subject)

[mrph]

So, the 2nd Battalion of the Iraqi Armed Forces refused to fight in Fallujah.

At the time, the Washington Post quoted Major General Paul Eaton (who is "overseeing the development of Iraqi security forces") as saying members of the battalion insisted that they "did not sign up to fight Iraqis."

General John Abizaid, much more widely quoted in the press, has a different view on things. He says the battalion "did not stand up to the intimidators", and he has a solution in mind: "In the next couple of days you'll see a large number of senior officers being appointed to key positions in the ministry of defence and the Iraqi joint staff and in Iraqi field commands.".

A lot of onlne news sources don't really elaborate on that statement, but the BBC site spells it out very clearly:

A number of top brass from Iraq's Baathist former regime would shortly be appointed to "key positions in the ministry of defence and the Iraqi joint staff and in Iraqi field commands", the top officer announced

Yeah, I can see why that makes sense to Abizaid. I mean, if they were "top brass" under Saddam, they're unlikely to have any real problems with shooting troublesome Iraqis, are they? Or anyone else they're told to shoot, for that matter.

Another great day for freedom and democracy, then.

Comments

[deeply-spurious.livejournal.com]

The problem, I think, is not that democracy can't work in Arab states - it is that democracy seems to take a huge amount of time to establish itself culturally - and also that it has far more chance of success when it is created from within than when it is imposed from without... In Iraq, for example, the democracy will always be vulnerable to attack by nationalists who will be able to present it as an alien phenomenon imposed from without...

Having said that, even the beginnings of democracies in the West were not exactly without chaos, bloodshed or elements of authoritarianism.