Adjusting to Reality in Iraq

KIRKUSH, Iraq -- The first battalion of the New Iraqi Army will complete its two-month training course here on Saturday with a well-orchestrated graduation ceremony. The soldiers will pledge allegiance not to Saddam Hussein but to a new code that declares: "I am a patriot. I voluntarily serve in the cause of freedom from oppression for my country, Iraq."

These 700 new soldiers embody America's effort to remake Iraq. But the training program also illustrates the obstacles and misjudgments that have plagued the U.S. effort to stabilize the country. Because of these difficulties, American officials said in interviews that they are planning some major changes in their security strategy.

The heart of the revised plan is to build the new army quickly around salvageable remnants of the old one, rather than create it from scratch. The United States and its coalition partners will seek help from officers of the old military, possibly including the former defense minister, Gen. Sultan Hashem Ahmed. In effect, it's an accelerated exit strategy.

"It's all about time," said Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who is in charge of the coalition's military training program. He explained in an interview that several hundred selected officers from the old Iraqi army would begin a three-month retraining course in January in what Eaton identified as "Country X." That country is Jordan, according to Jordanian officials.

A new military academy in Iraq will simultaneously begin training several thousand noncommissioned officers, Eaton said. When the officers and NCOs have completed their courses at the end of March, they will be assigned to bases in various parts of the country. There, they will take command of newly recruited Iraqi soldiers and lead them in three months of basic training, with help from coalition advisers.

The original plan was to train 27 battalions, or roughly 40,000 men, over the next two years. Eaton said his revised plan will create that force in half the time, so that the new army should be ready a year from now. It will be able take over from coalition troops basic tasks such as guarding Iraq's borders, escorting convoys and maintaining checkpoints. After the first battalion graduates, it will be attached to the U.S. Army's 4th Division and help patrol the Iraqi-Syrian border.

Vinnell Corp., the U.S.-based contractor that trained the first battalion here, will mostly be replaced by the Iraqi officers and NCOs who will lead basic training under the accelerated plan, Eaton said.

The most controversial aspect of the new plan, in Washington if not Iraq, is likely to be its reliance on officers from the old Iraqi army. That marks a sharp break with the strategy of wholesale "de-Baathification" that has been pressed by Ahmed Chalabi, a member of the interim Governing Council who until recently was the Pentagon's favorite Iraqi.

U.S. administrator Paul Bremer had embraced this start-from-scratch approach when he decided to disband the Iraqi army last May, a decision that is now regarded by some members of Bremer's team as a mistake. Eaton said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld strongly supports his revised plan.

Eaton said he hasn't yet met Gen. Ahmed, the former Iraqi defense minister, but would like to. "We need all the advice and help we can get," he said.

I got a glimpse of the training program last weekend when I traveled in a military convoy to this base about 100 miles northeast of Baghdad. With me in the convoy were three Iraqi clerics -- a Shiite, a Sunni and a Kurd -- who had all agreed to meet with the recruits and bless their participation in the New Iraqi Army.

The clerics' visit illustrated one of the trickiest problems facing Iraq -- how to mold its fractious religious groups into a single army and nation. The first battalion is 60 percent Shiite Muslim, 20 percent Sunni, 10 percent Kurdish and 10 percent other religious minorities. The Kurdish percentage dropped when roughly 100 Kurdish recruits quit soon after the training began, because their tribal leaders didn't want them mixing with non-Kurds.

In an effort to combine diversity and ethnic cohesion, each of the four infantry companies in the first battalion is divided into platoons that are exclusively Shiite, Sunni or Kurdish.

"We told the soldiers that the New Iraqi Army will be the nucleus for the future of Iraq," the Shiite cleric, Sheik Abdul-Karim Fatawi, said through an interpreter. "We must be one hand, all together."

The revised plan for the New Iraqi Army suggests that the Bush administration understands that time is short, and that it can't reinvent Iraq from the ground up. It must make compromises, and work with the material at hand. That pragmatism about postwar Iraq is long overdue.

davidignatius@washpost.com