GOT TO HAVE SOME OF YOUR POTENTIAL:

Sending in the 'Shahwanis': U.S. Marines build their own Iraqi militia to help them go against the insurgents (Ilana Ozernoy, 10/04/04, US News)

On the outskirts of this U.S. Marine base in hostile Anbar province west of Baghdad, an Iraqi military chant in Arabic cuts through the hazy stillness of the afternoon. "I'm a bayonet, and my strike is hard! I'm ready for death, not for shame!" shout a group of Iraqi men in military garb, their arms swinging and knees pumping to the beat of the song as they march in haphazard formation. "We're the Iraqi marines!" declares one of their officers, a 39-year-old man calling himself Major Haidr. "We're the Specialized Special Forces."

What makes this force really special is not that they are trained to rappel from helicopters or shoot with sniper precision, but that they are, effectively, an Iraqi militia under American command. U.S. Marine commanders hope the Iraqi force will bolster their units' strength in an area where the key to finding the enemy may be simply knowing whom to ask. "We're up against a country where we don't speak their language and don't know their culture," says U.S. Marine Capt. Jason Vose, 31, who works with the new Iraqi militia. These Iraqis, he says, "can go and identify the problems and the bad guys. They're sent into mosques that we can't go into. We've had them on the border; we've had them in Fallujah. And they just perform." [...]

The Marines call their allied Iraqi militiamen "Shahwanis," after their founder, Gen. Mohammed Shahwani, the recently appointed head of Iraqi intelligence, who fled Iraq in 1990 and was a key figure (along with current Prime Minister Ayad Allawi) in the unsuccessful 1996 CIA-backed coup against Saddam Hussein. After then occupation chief Paul Bremer disbanded the Iraqi Army--a decision now widely viewed as a mistake that left a large pool of angry, disaffected Iraqis--Shahwani rounded up a few ousted Army generals and a group of former special forces instructors and last spring united them with U.S. Marines looking for a creative solution to handling the violent Anbar province. Now 700 strong, this force falls under the command of the U.S. Marines, not Iraq's Defense Ministry. "A lot of guys," Vose says, "see them as the Marine Corps's militia."

Vietnamization worked--there's no reason Iraqification won't.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 26, 2004 12:10 PM