Paul Eaton Quoted in Stars and Stripes on Retraining the Iraqi Army

Retraining Iraq’s fractured army: Will it work this time?

By Heath Druzin 
September 11, 2014 | Stars and Stripes 

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who oversaw training of the Iraqi forces in the early days of the Iraq War, said that after the U.S invasion in 2003, American trainers tried to construct a military that was representative of the religious and ethnic makeup of a country where hostilities between Sunni and Shiite Muslims as well as Kurds and Arabs run deep.

Eaton and others involved in that training program say Maliki, a Shiite hardliner, started undoing the process as soon as U.S. troops withdrew from the country at the end of 2011.

“That process broke down with Maliki — it became a Shia-dominated army,” Eaton said. “The army became illegitimate in the eyes of the people and illegitimate in the eyes of the soldiers themselves.”

In order to address sectarian concerns, the U.S. plans to stand up National Guard units made up of Sunni tribesmen to operate in largely Sunni areas. It’s an idea with echoes of a similar program used to help bring Iraq out of a bloody civil war that engulfed the country between 2006 and 2008. That idea, known as the Awakening movement, involved paying Sunni tribesmen to turn against insurgents.

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