Question

One of the favorite tropes of the left (and some less-gifted elements of the right) in re the war in Iraq is that we made a huge mistake disbanding the Iraqi Army after the war.

Let's dispense with that forever, shall we?

Saddam's Iraqi Army combined the main features of two bad systems. Along with the vast majority of its equipment, Hussein's Army borrowed the USSR's system of leadership; a large officer corps selected more for loyalty than for competence, leading massed levies of draftee troops directly (that is, without the corps of long-service non-commissioned officers that take care of most of the day-to-day leadership and preserve most of the technical and low-level tactical expertise in Western armies).

And from the Arab tradition - indeed, from the tradition of the army of most of the world's dictators - Hussein took the basics of making sure the military was not a two-edged sword that could come back to bite him. Officers that become too popular with the troops were purged; Shi'a areas were patrolled by Sunni and Kurd troops, while Sunni areas had Shi'a and Kurd units (all led, of course, by demonstrably loyal officers); the Mukhabarat secret police and its huge network of informers prowled the barracks and officers' messes for signs of disloyalty. In the meantime, Hussein built a large, competing military, the Republican Guard, who like Hitler's SS and the Soviet MVD troops were selected for loyalty and trained and equipped as an elite - at least partly to defend the regime against the rest of the military, in extremis. Also, loyal officers were rewarded with the sort of perks that senior members of any dictatorial regime can expect; they benefitted from massive corruption. A fat and happy general who knows where the gravy train comes from is a general who's less likely to participate in a coup.

In short, there was nothing about Hussein's military that was in any way compatible with existing in a Democracy.

We've been through this before, of course; after World War II, the German Wehrmacht and the Japanese military were disbanded; when both countries began rebuilding militaries during the 1950's, it was only after their traditional officer castes had been neutralized or assimilated into the notion of democracy.

Keeping the Hussein-era Iraqi military would have meant keeping an institution with a vested interest in carrying out a coup against any future government.

And even if we were willing to accept that risk, there's the ineluctible fact that no Arab army (in the pan-arabist era of the past 100 years) has ever won a war. Zero. Hussein's military fought Iran to a bloody draw in the eighties' war of attrition. Lonely Israel clobbered Egypt, Syria, and various combinations of Iraq, Jordan, Morocco and other Arab nations four times in 25 years (I know what you're going to say; "what about the Omani Army in the Radfan campaign in the sixties and seventies? Good point - it was a counterinsurgency war - but the Omani Army was operating mainly as an adjunct of the British Army, with which Oman has maintained close military as well as diplomatic relations for almost 200 years; elite British forces like the SAS, the Parachute Regiment and tthe Royal Marines did most of the knife-point fighting in the Radfan; also, because of the British influence, the Omani military is easily the least Arabic of the Arab militaries. But thanks for asking). Why reinforce - or even adopt - a tradition of abject failure when rebuilding the Iraqi military from scratch (especially given what we knew about the insurgency in the spring and summer of 2003) was by all rational accounts the better option (assuming we took seriously the notion of a democratic Iraq?)