The U.S. is prepared to spend up to five billion dollars to create more jobs for police officers, paying $100-$150k a year. The Government can't find enough people to take the jobs, and is looking for recruits, no experience necessary, all training provided, right in your hometown.
One catch: the jobs are for Iraqis, in Iraq. No Americans need apply.
The secret mantra of the Iraq war has always been "training," specifically the always-just-out-of-reach goal of training the Iraq security forces to take over from the U.S. The cry has been heard for years: George W. Bush even made "we'll stand down as they stand up" a campaign slogan in 2008.
Now, as the war in Iraq proceeds through its eighth year, the State Department was on Capitol Hill October 12 in front of the Subcommittee on National Security, Homeland Defense and Foreign Operations begging a skeptical Congress for more money. "Training" is again being cited as the cure-all for America's apparently insatiable desire to throw money away in Mesopotamia. The latest tranche of taxpayer cash is for one billion dollars a year, every year for five years, to pay police instructors and cop salaries in Iraq.
A Long Train
The U.S. has been training Iraqi cops for years, under the auspices of Army and State contractors. In fact, the U.S. government has spent $7.3 billion for Iraqi police training since 2003. Now, with the Army shifting to teaching Iraqis how to operate the hi-tech weapons they will be buying from the U.S., the State Department is picking up the cop training gig full-time. A job announcement last year hired contract police instructors to go to Iraq, where, under the watchful eye of State's own internal Stasi, Diplomatic Security, they are preparing to start teaching at thirty locations around the country.
Given that the Army and State have been teaching police work in Iraq now for several years, the student cops must either be the world's slowest learners, or have the world's highest job turnover. Sadly, it looks like the latter. Iraqi cops tend to have very short life expectancies and that is why, even with the healthy salary offer of $150,000 a year (the average per capita income in Iraq is only $3800; cops in the US make concededly less than what State is willing to pay in Iraq. Starting salaries run $40-65k a year), State can't find enough, um, bodies, to fill up the recruit classes.
The Hard, Short Life of an Iraqi Cop
As an example of how life is for an Iraqi law officer, this week alone attacks included two suicide car bombs minutes apart at Baghdad police stations, killing at least 25 people in the capital's deadliest day in a month. More than 70 people were wounded. In one instance, the street in front of a police station had been closed from 2004, but was reopened about four weeks ago, sadly allowing the suicide bomber to get close to the station house. In other attacks the same day, a bomb wounded a police brigadier general in north Baghdad, while two police were shot in south Baghdad.
These attacks took place in an Iraq still occupied by some 41,000 American soldiers. Come January 2012, the U.S. Army posture will diminish to an as yet undetermined number, likely around 5,000 troops. The State Department hopes to conduct its police training under these conditions, protected by its own mercenary army of 5000 security contractors, using hand-me-down Army gear.
Corruption, Mismanagement and Torture
The killing of Iraqi cops is probably the main issue holding back recruitment. However, the lack of organized control by their parent organization, the Iraqi Ministry of Interior (MOI), is another impediment to a well-run police force, regardless of how much training they receive.
In December 2006, the Iraq Study Group reported that the Iraqi Interior Ministry was filled with corruption, infiltrated by militia and unable to control its own police. In July 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported that Iraq's MOI had become a "federation of oligarchs" where various floors of the headquarters building were controlled by rival militia groups and organized criminal gangs. The report described the MOI as an eleven-story powder keg of factions where power struggles were settled by assassinations in the parking lot. In its September 2007 report, the congressionally-mandated Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq described Iraq's MOI as a "ministry in name only," "dysfunctional," "sectarian" and suffering from "ineffective leadership." To make matters worse, the police have been implicated in multiple incidents of href="http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2011/09/06/cables-reveal-more-on-wolf-brigade-torture-of-iraqis-how-it-fuels-violence/" target="_hplink">torture.
Who Will Guard the Guards?
There remain significant questions on if State will be able to oversee the huge police training program.
The State Department's International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) bureau came under fire from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) for its management of the contract with DynCorp to train police. A 2010 audit concluded that "INL lacks sufficient resources and controls to adequately manage the task orders with DynCorp. As a result, over $2.5 billion in US funds are vulnerable to waste and fraud." Most of $1.2 billion State was given to train Iraqi police remains unaccounted for. Though not directly related to police training, State's own Inspector General just found that INL mismanaged another Dynacorp contract in Afghanistan to the tune of href="http://pogoblog.typepad.com/pogo/2011/10/state-dept-ig-finds-waste-and-mismanagement-on-afghanistan-contract.html" target="_hplink">$940,000, in large part because of lack of staff to oversee the project.
Following the negative report by SIGIR, State did the logical thing: they slammed the door on the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction auditors. State's coordinator for Iraq transition, Patricia Haslach, told Congress that SIGIR has almost no jurisdiction over State Department spending in Iraq, including that five billion sought for police training. State's reluctance to submit to the audits is understandable; SIGIR stated that 400,000 Iraqis received training and are on the force, but the "capabilities of these forces are unknown because no assessments of total force capabilities were made."
The Bright Side
Undersecretary of State Pat Kennedy reminded Congress October 12 without irony that "We have a robust contracting oversight system firmly in place and being executed by our Bureau of Administration. The Bureau of Diplomatic Security is overseeing its competitively awarded security task orders using the enhanced oversight and management system put in place over the last several years."
Pat Kennedy also said that providing assistance to the Iraqi police and security forces "will eventually reduce the cost of our presence as security in the country improves and we can rely on Iraqi security for our own protection."
And it is not like State has just been sitting on its hands. In July 2011, out of Iraq's 400,000 cops, the State Department invited nine of them to the U.S. for three weeks with local police forces in Vermont, Pittsburgh and Denver, cities that no doubt offer a lot of points of commonality with policing in Iraq.
With plans like that, what could go wrong?