this is horribly depressing. (bet ya can't resist to click the link just to see what i'm talking about. right? you know you shouldn't, who wants to be depressed. but you will anyway)
the article doesn't clearly distinguish between two very different problems: (1) the use of iraqi police and military uniforms by insurgents/militia who are not really in the police or military, and (2) the infiltration of the police and military by militia. the infiltration is the real issue. it's far more serious if iraqi officers themselves are taking part in sectarian violence. and that's why no new hard-to-counterfeit uniforms will solve the problem.
in fact, i'm not sure how the problem can be solved without scrapping the existing military and police and starting over from scratch once again. even that might not work, but in any case it's not gonna happen either. starting over would mean an american pullout would move even further over the horizon, something the iraqi government would not want to ever say in public. and iraqis who risk their lives to join the new force will be in even more danger if they are demobiled and told they can reapply later.
and here in the u.s. such an announcement would be tantamount to an admission that the entire iraqi reconstruction project is an abject failure. president bush has made the new iraqi army the centerpiece of his speeches for much of the past year-and-a-half. for all his bragging about the number of iraqi forces trained (numbers which are dubious at best and often inconsistent from speech to speech), bush won't acknowledge that many of those forces are part of the problem, not the solution.
and so we're stuck. many elements of the iraqi army and police prey upon the civilian population, engaging in sectarian killings and kidnappings. that's been widely reported for quite some time.
and yet the practical and political reality of the situation dictates that it's not going to get any better.
like i said, depressing.
