enders cited are the Interior Ministry police commandos, a force made up largely of former army officers and special forces soldiers drawn from the ranks of Saddam’s dissolved army. They are seen as the most effective tool the coalition has in fighting the insurgency.
“It’s a gruesome situation we are in,” a senior Iraqi official said. “You have to understand the situation when the special commandos were formed last August. They were taking on an awful lot of people in a great hurry. Many of them were people who served in Saddam’s forces . . . The choice of taking them on was a difficult one. There was no supervision. There still really isn ’t any, and that applies to all the security forces. They’re all doing this.”
That line about Iraq now being worse than under Saddam: I always used to think, people saying that really don’t have a clue what it was like to live under a regime like Saddam’s. I still think that, but it’s a case that will get harder to argue as long as this continues. Let’s hope the benefits of openness in the new Iraq – that this sort of thing gets reported and gets condemned – will have some effect.
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