Law and Disorder Misjudgments Marred U.S. Plans for Iraqi Police

By MICHAEL MOSS and DAVID ROHDE
Published: May 21, 2006

As chaos swept Iraq after the American invasion in 2003, the Pentagon began its effort to rebuild the Iraqi police with a mere dozen advisers. Overmatched from the start, one was sent to train a 4,000-officer unit to guard power plants and other utilities. A second to advise 500 commanders in Baghdad. Another to organize a border patrol for the entire country.

Three years later, the police are a battered and dysfunctional force that has helped bring Iraq to the brink of civil war. Police units stand accused of operating death squads for powerful political groups or simple profit. Citizens, deeply distrustful of the force, are setting up their own neighborhood security squads. Killings of police officers are rampant, with at least 547 slain this year, roughly as many as Iraqi and American soldiers combined, records show.

The police, initially envisioned by the Bush administration as a cornerstone in a new democracy, have instead become part of Iraq's grim constellation of shadowy commandos, ruthless political militias and other armed groups. Iraq's new prime minister and senior American officials now say that the country's future — and the ability of America to withdraw its troops — rests in large measure on whether the police can be reformed and rogue groups reined in.

Like so much that has defined the course of the war, the realities on the ground in Iraq did not match the planning in Washington. An examination of the American effort to train a police force in Iraq, drawn from interviews with several dozen American and Iraqi officials, internal police reports and visits to Iraqi police stations and training camps, reveals a cascading series of misjudgments by White House and Pentagon officials, who repeatedly underestimated the role the United States would need to play in rebuilding the police and generally maintaining order.

Before the war, the Bush administration dismissed as unnecessary a plan backed by the Justice Department to rebuild the police force by deploying thousands of American civilian trainers.

Current and former administration officials said they were relying on a Central Intelligence Agency assessment that said the Iraqi police were well trained. The C.I.A. said its assessment conveyed nothing of the sort.

After Baghdad fell, when the majority of Iraqi police officers abandoned their posts, a second proposal by a Justice Department team calling for 6,600 police trainers was reduced to 1,500, and then never carried out. During the first eight months of the occupation — as crime soared and the insurgency took hold — the United States deployed 50 police advisers in Iraq.

Against the objections of Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, the long-range plan was eventually reduced to 500 trainers. The result was a police captain from North Carolina having 40 Americans to train 20,000 Iraqi police across four provinces in southern Iraq.

Throughout Iraq, Americans were faced with the realization that in trying to rebuild the Iraqi force they were up against the legacy of Saddam Hussein. Not only was the force inept and rife with petty corruption, but in the wake of the invasion the fractious tribal, sectarian and criminal groups were competing to control the police. Yet for much of last year, American trainers were able to regularly monitor fewer than half of the 1,000 police stations in Iraq, where even officers free of corrupting influences lacked basic policing skills like how to fire a weapon or investigate a crime.

While even a viable police force alone could not have stopped the insurgency and lawlessness that eventually engulfed Iraq, officials involved acknowledge that the early, halting effort to rebuild the force was a missed opportunity.

Frank Miller, a former National Security Council official who coordinated the American effort to govern Iraq from 2003 to 2005, conceded in an interview that the administration did not put enough focus on the police.

"More attention should have been paid to the police after the fall of Baghdad," said Mr. Miller, one of the officials who objected to the original proposal to deploy thousands of advisers. "That is obvious. Iraq needed law and order established."

What attempts there were to train the police were marred by poor coordination, civilian and military officials said. During the first two years of the war, three different government groups developed three different plans to train Iraq's police, all without knowing of the existence of the other.

Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner sent to Iraq in 2003 to lead the police mission, said Pentagon officials gave him just 10 days notice and little guidance.

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