Building Iraq's Army

Strategypage says its hard building up Iraq's army, especially after Saddam:

In the last two years, an enormous effort has been made to build a new Iraqi army. This is not easy, for the old Iraqi army was widely considered (based on performance alone) to be one of the most inept armys in the world. Despite spending over a hundred billion dollars on it, Saddam was never able to build a force that could fight effectively. Without the widespread use of chemical weapons in the 1980s, Iraq would have been overrun by an army of poorly equipped Iranian amateurs. The main problem was that the old Iraqi army was designed more for political, than combat, reliability. ThatÂ’s the main reason it was disbanded shortly after Iraq was conquered in 2003.

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