The Iraqi Army Never Was

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-iraqi-army-never-was/ and below.

 

The American Conservative

The Iraqi Army Never Was
Posted By Kelley Vlahos
On October 9, 2014
In a bloody ISIS attack on an Iraqi Army base just north of Fallujah on September 21, upwards of 500 government soldiers perished or disappeared, fleeing into the marshlands, the woods, or to the next base camp four miles away. Few were left behind alive, surrounded by militant fighters who by all accounts were supposed to be less equipped, less trained, and less organized than Iraq’s professional fighting force.
But the Iraqi security forces, into which American taxpayers poured some $25 billion over the course of a decade, had in the span of a summer, crumbled.
While pro-war critics blame the Iraqi military’s failures on the current administration for leaving the country too soon, American veterans and journalists who spoke with TAC say the army was corrupt, incompetent, and unmotivated from the beginning, and that top U.S. officials papered over this inconvenient fact for years in order to protect their commands and maintain public support for the U.S. intervention.
The Paper Tiger Foldshttp://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-iraqi-army-never-was/