US to ease tension with new Iraqi army

THE UNITED STATES yesterday announced new plans to pacify angry former Iraqi soldiers and create a new Iraqi army as two visiting US senators said American soldiers could stay for more than five years.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, urged President Bush to do some “real truth-telling” to explain to his people how much commitment and money would be needed to rebuild the country from the ruins of war and 35 years of Ba’athist rule.

“I think we’re going to be here in a big way with forces and economic input for a minimum of three to five years,” his Democrat colleague Joseph Biden of Delaware told reporters.

Many Iraqis were glad to see the back of Saddam Hussein, but are impatient to get rid of their US-British occupiers. One grudge is failure to install an interim Iraqi government and get public servants back to paid work.

The US-led administration disbanded the old army last month along with security agencies and the information and defence ministries, making about 400,000 people jobless. “This country was grotesquely over-militarised,” Walter Slocomb, an aide to chief administrator Paul Bremer, told a news conference. “It is the fact most people who were in the old army will not be able to continue military careers.”

Slocomb said recruiting would begin next week for a new light infantry force that would eventually number about 40,000 to guard Iraq’s borders and key installations.

The aim was to get a 12,000-strong division fully operational a year after training began. Two more divisions would be trained and ready within two years, he said.

Slocomb said former soldiers would now be paid a “monthly interim stipend” slightly lower than their previous salaries until a new Iraqi government could decide their future.

Payscales for the stipend would be similar to civil servant salaries, ranging from $50 to $150 a month.

Senior Ba’athists would be excluded from the compensation plan and the new army.

Anger among unpaid soldiers boiled over into violence last week when American troops shot dead two protesters in a crowd that was stoning a military convoy as it drove into the administration’s headquarters in Saddam’s former palace compound in Baghdad.