Iraq’s problem? Its leaders’ stupidity, greed, corruption and incompetence

Watching yet more chaos in Iraq, some people might be wondering where the massive, US-trained Iraqi army is. I found this expert assessment of Iraq’s military (see below) quite interesting. It shows that Iraq’s current problems are, as usual with these primitive, Third-World hell-hole countries, purely due to the stupidity, tribalism, greed, corruption and incompetence of Iraq’s leaders.

When will we ever learn that these primitive hell-holes don’t ‘do democracy’? When will our useless leaders understand that the only way to govern primitive hell-holes is with a strong leader and a merciless security force?

Here’s the assessment of Iraq’s military:

“Iraq�s army was once a formidable military that waged an eight-year war with Iran. The US spent over $20 billion to train and equip Iraqi security forces. But in June 2014 once-proud Iraqi army simply collapsed and failed to defend the country�s second-largest city. Tens of thousands of Iraqi troops abandoned their posts and fled.

By 2014 the Iraqi army suffered from unhappiness among soldiers as a result of the underpayment or nonpayment of wages for months, particularly in the north and west. Here the army suffered from declining morale and desertions in the early months of 2014. This came as it battled the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which had seized control of Fallujah and Ramadi at the beginning of 2014. The Army made no gains against a foe that was well armed and highly motivated.

Desertion rates depended on whether units were deployed outside their home areas or were operating against insurgents of their own religious or ethnic background. Desertions were reported to be particularly high among Sunni soldiers from Sunni-dominated central and northern Iraq. There were significant loyalty issues in predominantly Sunni Arab units commanded by Shi’ite officers, following the purges of Sunni officers over the previous three years under the Maliki government. The Iraqi army in the north and west also suffered from low morale among Shi’ite soldiers from the south of the country, who had neither a regional nor communal affinity with the populations they were defending. Over 90 percent of the Iraqi Army is composed of Shi’ites.

Before these troops disintegrated in Mosul in June 2014, the Iraq army was losing as many as 300 soldiers a day to desertion, death, and injury. When they abandoned Mosul in mid-June, military personnel abandoned their vehicles, discarded their weapons, discarded their uniforms onto the street, and changed into civilian clothes.

By 14 June 2014 the situation in the Sunni north-western parts of Iraq amounted to the collapse of the forces of the army and federal police. With the fall of Nineveh Mosul, operational command virtually ceased, with the defeated remnants of the 2nd Infantry Division of the Iraqi army and the third motorized division of the federal police in Iraq running south or towards the Kurdish autonomy. The road between Baghdad and Mosul was cut, and in the province of Salah al-Din, militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Sham) launched an offensive and captured the Tikrit administrative center as well as Suleiman Bek, Baiji (along with a large oil refinery there), etc. The situation for the Iraqi forces operational command “Tiger” was extremely unfavorable, with the 4th Infantry Division in Tikrit defeated and / or running. Also according to reports from the Kurds, the 12th Infantry Division in Kirkuk was close to panic, with mass desertion and abandonment of combat positions.

The role of the officer corps remained confused. According to some accounts, the Maliki government had promoted officers based on political loyalty, producing a militarily imcompetent officer corps. By other accounts, Iraqi soldiers reported that their officers had ordered them to surrender rather than fight.

International media reported that two division of Iraqi soldiers � roughly 30,000 men � fled an insurgent ISIS force of approximately 1,000. Iraqi troops who fled the advance of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fighters into Mosul denied that they abandoned their posts, saying that they had received orders to flee from up the chain of command.”

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iraq/nia.htm