Could its army unify Iraq?(Army Building and Nation Building)(Book review)

Vance Serchuk, "Army Building and Nation Building," AEI National Security Outlook, February 2006 (aei.org)

Napoleon Bonaparte derided the Duke of Wellington as a "sepoy general," and indeed it was as a commander of native troops in India that Wellington made his sterling reputation. So Lieutenant General John Vines followed a proud tradition when he told the New York Times in 2005, as incoming commander of American ground forces in Iraq, that he considered the training of Iraqis to be his "number one job."

AEI research fellow Vance Serchuk argues that there will be a necessarily political component to this. Iraqification of that nation's security duties will go hand in hand with its new national identity as a democracy. Building an army requires building a nation.

The biggest obstacle to completing these tasks is continued fragmentation of the population--a trend established by Saddam's relentless use of internal rivalries during his rule. As one commentator put it, "The thing that holds a military unit together is trust. That's a society not based on trust." Serchuk warns against viewing such divisions as intractable or deterministic, though. History provides examples ...