other benefits and would have their militia time count towards their retirement from other
government jobs. He asserted that 90,000 militia members would be processed into security
forces or civilian life by January 2005, and the rest by the end of 2005.
The five-year approach
recommended by the T&R Strategy had now shrunk to, effectively, seven months.
The flaws in this approach were readily apparent,
and the process broke down quickly.
The TRIC dissolved into bureaucratic infighting, as the Iraqi government lacked the institutional
strength to push the process. There was mutual distrust between the government and the armed
groups, which did not want to either provide lists of names or register their weapons – neither
provision of CPA Order 91 had been included in the memos signed a week earlier. Very few
militia members could prove that they qualified for retirement pensions, and Iraqi government
officials were skeptical of any such claims. The Minister of Defense did not want “Islamists” in
the security forces, which eliminated almost all of them from signing up; many militia members
also demanded to be brought in at ranks higher than what was offered them. This left the
vocational and educational programs, which simply did not exist – and given the state of the
Iraqi economy, did not promise much for the future anyway. The only success in the program
involved the peshmerga, which had mostly been converted as a whole into a security force for
the Kurdistan Regional Government, as allowed by law.
It appeared that there were only two options available for the United States. One was to
aggressively proceed to disband militia groups, an approach advocated by some in both the Iraqi
and American governments. This process appeared unwise, however, at least for the short term.
Whatever the flaws of these militias in principle, they were mostly inactive or even supportive of
Iraqi government goals – the political wing of each was a member of the Iraqi Interim
34
Remarks of the Prime Minister of Iraq, 7 June 2004.
35
See Anthony H. Cordesman, “U.S. Policy in Iraq: A ‘Realist’ Approach to Its Challenges and Opportunities,”
Center for Strategic and International Studies, 6 August 2004.
36
Iraq’s Transitional Administrative Law, June 2004, Article 54.
Convention