Security official says recalling Iraqi army would be 'mistake'

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The chief security adviser in the U.S.-led occupation flatly rejected on Tuesday proposals by Iraqi leaders that the old Iraqi army be recalled to duty to help stem the anti-American guerrilla war.

It would be "a mistake even if it had been feasible," said Walter Slocombe of the Coalition Provisional Authority. He said he foresees undisciplined "mobs of people" responding simply to collect pay in job-hungry Iraq.

The CPA, in fact, is even cutting back on plans to train a new Iraqi army -- plans that were already small-scale -- by reducing its projected strength by late next year to 35,000, down from 40,000, Slocombe told The Associated Press.

The money saved will be shifted to more quickly trained security forces, to produce thousands more members of the Iraq Civil Defense Corps, for example, a paramilitary force whose members patrol with U.S. troops, monitor highways and perform similar functions.

"It's relatively cheap and relatively quick, and we obviously need additional Iraqi capability in the security area," he told AP in the interview in his modest office at the huge, opulent Republican Palace, the CPA headquarters in central Baghdad.

That security need hit close to home just five hours later, when two insurgent mortar shells landed inside the headquarters enclave beside the Tigris River. The attack, which wounded four people, came after a bloody spell for the occupation army, including the deadliest blow yet by the Iraq resistance against the Americans -- 15 soldiers killed Sunday in the shootdown of a transport helicopter.

The insurgency has built steadily since Saddam Hussein's 400,000-member Iraqi army disintegrated last April in the face of the U.S.-British invasion. On May 23, Slocombe's boss, L. Paul Bremer, the chief U.S. administrator here, formally dissolved the nonexistent army.

Last month, however, the head of Iraq's U.S.-appointed interim Governing Council declared that the old army should be reconstituted. By supporting the recall, the United States would "speed the process of relieving the burden on its troops," said Iyad Allawi, the council's president for October.

Other council members endorsed the idea, as did some opposition Democratic lawmakers in Washington. On Sunday, The New York Times quoted unidentified senior U.S. military officers as saying such a recall was under consideration.

Is it? Slocombe was asked. "Not by anybody I know," he replied.

A former undersecretary of defense in the Clinton administration, now Bremer's chief deputy on such issues, Slocombe noted he was involved in meetings last week in Washington with top Pentagon officials, and an army remobilization is "not a subject that's been discussed at all in the meetings I've been involved in."

He said there were practical reasons: Troops of the collapsing army took their weapons and other equipment with them, and looters stripped their bases of the rest. "You can't have an army with no place to put them," he said. "You can't have an army with no weapons, no uniforms, no vehicles, no place to eat, no place to work."

It would be a huge expense to refit such a force, he said. But also there are "good policy reasons" not to do so.

"The Iraqi army wasn't the worst of Saddam's institutions, but it was a part of the system," he said. "The idea that we'd take heroic measures to somehow restore this instrument would have been a mistake even if it had been feasible."

At first, Slocombe argued that the conscripts of the old army would never answer a call to return to an institution they despised. He then acknowledged, however, that the massive unemployment problem in Iraq -- where most of the work force, including young ex-soldiers, are without jobs -- would draw them to any promise of pay.

But then "you would have had mobs of people, with no internal discipline," Slocombe said.