Haider Abdul Murshed – researcher
Introduction
The philosophy of security management in Iraq has always been hostage to the political mood; For the nature of the system and what it wants from the security establishment, protect the state or the incumbent?
This confusion has negatively affected the composition of the security institutions and the nature of the duties entrusted to them When the army is established to protect the state from external risks, and not interfere in politics, or internal security duties, in Iraq Since its inception, politics has been strongly present in it, and in the least burdensome circumstances it has been entrusted with internal security duties, It is not at the heart of his philosophy, nor is it compatible with the training received by his personnel, soldiers, and officers.
On the other hand, the work of the security institutions overlapped among themselves, in the era of dictatorship and the total domination of the State by Saddam Hussein. Duties have been confused and no organ has clearly defined the limits of its powers. Saddam Hussein’s goal – with intentional intent – is not to provide the capacity of any security apparatus; To pose a threat to his stay in power, he weakened the army, dispersed the rest of the security apparatus, and linked it to a library in twisted ways, making it dual-linked, forming a security ministry, but reporting first to the Office of the President, before even the responsible Minister, as was the case in the Directorate of Public Security, for example.
The debate on military interference in politics and deviation in security institutions in favor of dictatorship cannot be confined to this paper, but what we are discussing here is the continued confusion in security work, the dispersal and overlapping of duties, which hurt the performance of security institutions’ duties.
Security and its institutions: the chaos of duties
With the foregoing, certain traditions were followed by those entrusted with security duties before 2003, and the officers and members of the Ministry of the Interior were exercising their functions based on well-known standards, enjoying at least some consistency with those who adhere to the middle and lower levels of responsibility. Senior officers were alumni of the Police Academy, who were promoted across the career and accumulation of experience, as was the Public Security Directorate which owned an independent academy, and research center, and developed its staff with specialized courses consistent with the nature of its work, regardless of the aim being to protect the head of power, not the state.
Army officers rarely held responsibilities in the Ministry of the Interior, and grades in the interior were not allowed above the brigade; Because this rank is the end of what the Ministry needs, in connection with the nature of its functions.
After 2003, there was considerable chaos in the formation of the Ministry. And whoever joined it, whether who came to the Ministry from outside institutional work, even from outside the army, Or demobilized officers of the army who have been reinstated in the Ministry of the Interior. let’s see that there are Staff College graduates doing policing, Not to mention that the ranks in the ministry have even reached the grade of the first team, without the need for that rank.
Not just at this point, the political differences, the position of the major influential powers in Iraq after 2003 — the United States and Iran in particular — from the re-establishment of the Iraqi army — until they adopted the designation of the National Guard instead of the Army to describe the first military formations established after the decision of the President of the Civil Coalition Authority, Paul Primi, to dissolve the Iraqi army — under a major security imbalance that led to the establishment of hybrid, intermediate-arming military units. The Internal Commando Regiment, which eventually became the National Police Command, is assigned combat missions and is linked to the Ministry of the Interior, which is supposed to exercise non-combat security functions, or at least to fight differently than in the military.
