You cannot train an army over night. You certainly cannot instantly ingrain alien concepts like “human rights” into rebuilt remnants of Iraq’s security forces. It takes time but we are now seeing results.
Iraq’s own forces are now controlling the Iran-Iraq border. Congratulations to them, and congratulations to the fine people who trained them.
With solid foundations in place, we will now be seeing Iraqi’s take over their own security at an accelerating pace.
Given the bad blood between the Iraqis and the Iranians, this strikes me as an excellent development.
Who better than the Iraqis to do a thorough job of closing this border to the terrorist traffic that has no doubt been crossing it regularly the past several months?
Who better than the Iraqis to make the Iranian mullahs sweat? I can’t imagine that the mullahs are glad to see a reconstituted Iraqi army, backed up by the US 4th armored division, on their border as the mullahs struggle to repress their own internal liberation movement.
This article from the D-T might lead one to believe that there ought to be some Coalition forces doing back-up in that region, if the new Iraqi forces have not yet been thoroughly vetted.