GAO Report: Iraqi Security is a Mess

By DHinMI

The House Government Reform Sub-committee heard testimony today from an official of the General Accounting Office, the non-partisan investigatory arm of Congress, about the challenges involved in attempting to prepare the Iraqi military and police forces to take over the security of the country so we can begin to draw down our own forces in Iraq. The picture he painted is not pretty.

Regarding the main subject of the report, nobody has good information on the preparedness of the Iraqi forces. The Iraqi Ministry of Interior doesn’t collect reliable status reports from the police units. The number of troops and police reported to have been trained, equipped and on duty amounts to only 51% of the necessary forces required to turn over control by July 2006 (as spelled out in a classified Department of Defense campaign plan), and even that number is grossly inflated, as it includes police and soldiers who are absent without leave (AWOL), which unnamed DoD officials claim number “in the tens of thousands” out of a total of just 59,000. To make matters worse, DoD and State have stopped monitoring the status of Iraqi force readiness through reports of weaponry, vehicles, communication capabilities and prevalence of body armor.

But the most revealing part of the report is contained in the background information. According to GAO, and contrary to the propaganda from the White House celebrating a “peaceful” election, the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency told GAO that “attacks on Iraq’s election day reached about 300, double the previous 1 day high of about 150 during last year’s Ramadan.” Furthermore, the peak months for attacks since June 2003 were August and November 2004, and January 2005. During this period, according to GAO, the attacks have grown in intensity and sophistication. (And presumably in  lethality.)

Finally, GAO dismisses the notion that most of the attacks are being perpetrated by foreign fighters who’ve slipped into Iraq from Syria or elsewhere. Foreign fighters, they claim, “comprise a small component of the insurgency,” which is made up primarily of Sunni Arabs tied to the Baathist regime, with a small group of Jihadists responsible for high profile attacks (i.e., the terrorism against Shia, which I’ll write about sometime in the next few days). They also mention that Muqtada al-Sadr’s forces “remain a threat to the political process” and are “re-arming, re-organizing, and training, with al-Sadr keeping his options open to employ his forces.”

Overall, a much less optimistic picture than anything that's come out of the White House since the war began two years ago.  But don't worry too much; just remember, democracy is on the march.