SOMETHING very significant happened Wednesday in Iraq. In two separate incidents Iraq police and security forces successfully took on insurgents without the presence of coalition forces. In Fallujah police stormed the house where four Jordanian hostages were being held and freed them. In Mosul police engaged in running battles with insurgents in which a leading member of the group was among the dozen people killed.
The Iraqis are not as practiced at news management as the coalition and there has been frustratingly little information about both incidents. Nevertheless this is the first time that the Iraqi authorities have flexed their muscles by themselves. Whatever shortcomings that may emerge about them, these two operations should quieten critics of the quality and standard of Iraqi police and security forces. It was always going to be a major task to rebuild police and army — virtually from scratch and to inculcate into recruits the notion of policing a free society, one where the law was no longer whatever a dictator, his family and his cronies decided it would be.
The world’s media in Baghdad has overlooked the remarkable fact that though lines of would-be police and army recruits have so often been the targets for suicide car bombers and though insurgents regularly attack Iraqi police officers, the flow of applicants has not abated. Certainly a proportion of these men are just looking for a job with good pay. Maybe they also mistakenly believe that being a policeman will carry the same dominant status as in the days of Saddam. Many of that mind will have been weeded out by the recruiters, who do not want to hire bullies but people whose duty will be to enforce the law impartially and protect Iraqi society.
There is a further conclusion to be drawn from the car bomb massacres of lines of would-be recruits. This is that the insurgents are targeting them because they recognize that these are the people who once trained, will be coming after them.
Maybe the powerful technical intelligence capability of the coalition forces was able to give the Iraqi authorities some assistance in advance of their two engagements Wednesday. However as US legislators have recently concluded, signals intercepts and satellite monitoring are by themselves insufficient to prosecute an effective war. Human intelligence is essential. Any tips-off that led to these two operations almost certainly came to the Iraqi authorities from ordinary citizens who would have thought twice about giving the same information to anyone from the coalition.
Now that Iraqis are in charge, there is general despair at the persistent violence. Even in Fallujah in the old Baath party heartland former supporters of Saddam Hussein are reconciling themselves to the new political reality and their loss of privilege. More importantly they are losing sympathy with the die-hards in their midst who prosecute their pointless campaign of violence. Such people can only survive if they have people in the community prepared to harbor and sustain them. The writing would seem to be on the wall for unreconciled Baathists.
The Iraqi police meanwhile have notched up their first independent victories. Morale among all officers will climb while confidence of the insurgents will assuredly suffer from their first defeats exclusively at the hands of the Iraqi authorities.
