After Olson's comment was translated, Hamid nodded but his expression betrayed disagreement. "There is a war there," he said, referring to Fallujah. "People are afraid to come to work."
Olson asked about the unit's vehicles, which were stolen by the insurgents over the summer. Had the guardsmen recovered them? Hamid said they had not.
Iraqi National Guardsmen, shown here at a ceremony in Baghdad, have sometimes refused to fight fellow Iraqis.
(Andrea Bruce Woodall -- The Washington Post)
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As Olson walked out into the bright afternoon sun, the task ahead was clear to him. "We have to start from scratch," he said.
Not Enough Forces
In early April, as the Marines were besieging Fallujah, U.S. commanders ordered one of the first battalions of Iraq's reconstituted army to join the fight in a supporting role. The commanders figured it would provide the Iraqi soldiers with a valuable lesson. It turned out to be the other way around.
When the soldiers, who had just finished basic training, were told where they were being sent, they staged a mutiny and refused to board transport helicopters. The Iraqis told U.S. officers that they did not enlist in order to fight fellow Iraqis.
Stunned U.S. military officials tried to determine what had gone wrong. According to several commanders, they eventually concluded that it was a mistake to have a private contractor conduct basic training, a concern that had already been raised by some veteran military officers, who maintained that the military would have done a better job. Their objection was ignored by the Pentagon's civilian leadership. Once the soldiers finished boot camp, they were put under the command of U.S. officers whom they had never met.
The officials concluded later that U.S. Special Forces soldiers should have conducted the training and remained with the units during their first few missions, an approach that would have increased the likelihood of trust and confidence between the Iraqis and the Americans.
That conclusion required a wholesale revision of the training system, which delayed the deployment of Iraqi army units. Instead of fielding 12,000 soldiers by June, as the U.S. occupation administrator, L. Paul Bremer, had promised a year earlier, there were about 4,000 soldiers. There are currently about 6,000 in the field.
Although the director of the training effort, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, has vastly expanded boot camp capacity -- an additional 12,000 soldiers should be ready by the end of October -- the current size of the Iraqi army has placed the U.S. military and Iraq's interim government in a bind.
The top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., and the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, share a desire to flush insurgents out from Fallujah, Samarra, Ramadi and other Sunni Muslim-dominated cities where militants have congregated. But both men want those operations to involve a significant number of Iraqi forces.
With just six active Iraqi army battalions -- three of which have been deployed in the Shiite holy city of Najaf to oppose an insurgency there -- there are too few soldiers to conduct those joint operations.
"We simply don't have enough trained Iraqi forces right now to do what we need to do," said a senior U.S. military official in Iraq who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Senior U.S. commanders in Iraq said they intend to mount assaults against insurgent strongholds in the Sunni Triangle before the end of the year to allow Iraqi police and National Guard forces to reassert control. But the wait for trained Iraqi soldiers to conduct those operations means that they will occur precariously close to January's national elections.
Had the training mistakes been avoided, the official said, "we would have far more options now. We could retake Fallujah. We could deal with Samarra."
