Why the Iraqi army won't stand up

Our current best plan to solve the problem of Iraq? To inject more military trainers into the country to get the Iraqi army ready to stand up and fight. The more quickly the Iraqi army stands up, the more quickly our army can stand down.

This plan on the surface seems logical, yet it is based on a flawed assumption: that the Iraqi army is like our army, or the army of any other established nation state. We expect that the members of the Iraqi army will identify themselves first and foremost as Iraqis and will fight and die for their country, just as soldiers in our military will fight and die for America. But what if they don't and won't?

As a number of analysts have pointed out, there's really no Iraq to Iraq. The country is not so much a nation as it is an idea imposed a century ago by the British on a region divided among very distinct and antagonistic sects and tribes. The Iraqi soldier, in other words, is more likely to identify himself as a Sunni or a Shiite or a Kurd first and as an Iraqi second -- a very distant second. This hardly lends itself to establishing the esprit de corps necessary to accomplish what our government expects the Iraqi army to accomplish.

I suspect that most of the soldiers in the Iraqi army are there not out of patriotism but out of mere necessity. It's a job. They need some means of supporting themselves and their families. So if the head of some sectarian militia offers them a better deal, they are likely to take it. This is why our government is so worried about the Saudis funding the Sunni insurgents, or Iran supporting the Shiite militias.

To sum up, our current best strategy in Iraq is based upon the same thing that so many previous failed strategies were based upon: wishful thinking. So enough already about getting the Iraqi army to stand up. It's time for us to get the hell out of Dodge.