The Foreign Service Journal, March 2005

of police academies run by U.S. instructors from 2,300 to 5,300 people, with the eventual goal of putting 45,000 additional Iraqi police on the beat. The U.S. has made progress toward that goal, but has not yet reached it. The Iraqi police force had 53,000 trained and equipped police offi- cers as of January, up from 26,000 last June. The effort hasn’t impressed Senate leaders, though. “They have no idea what these guys are going to turn into when they hit the street,” says an aide to a top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “If a guy shows up [for training], he’s passing. This mission is production. It’s not quality, it’s quantity.” Robin Raphel acknowledged last year that the U.S. instructors have been told to shorten the training schedules in an effort to boost numbers quickly. “The object of this exercise is to get a credible Iraqi security presence — whether it’s Army, police or bor- der and facilities protection — in place, [and give them] increasingly more responsibility, as fast as possi- ble,” she said. Security Straitjacket Not all these problems should be blamed on the State Department, of course. Rick Barton, who served as director of the Office of Transition Initiatives at USAID in the 1990s, and who now heads the Post- Conflict Reconstruction Project for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says that poor deci- sions made early on have tied the department’s hands. Rather than focusing on large infrastructure pro- jects, such as rebuilding electrical and sewage systems, F O C U S M A R C H 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 25 Despite the best efforts of its staff, it may be a long time before Embassy Baghdad will be able to function as a traditional diplomatic mission. 2000 N. 14th Street n Suite 500 Arlington, VA 22201 Telephone (703) 797-3259 Fax (703) 524-7559 Tollfree (800) 424-9500