Former Washington D.C. police chief Charles Ramsey, the lead police expert on the Jones commission, knows all about community suspicion of the boys in blue. Yet, he told Sen. John Thune (R-SD), the distrust he saw directed at the Iraqi National Police was stunning. Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising: corrupt and brutal, and responsive to an Interior Ministry that the commission describes as a “11-story powder keg of factions,” the 25,000 member force, Ramsey disclosed, is a stunning 85 percent Shiite and only 13 percent Sunni.
The commission recommends disbanding the Iraqi National Police and reconfiguring it under the Interior Ministry. But commission members didn’t really address how any improvement in the police force is possible absent a drastic overhaul in the Interior Ministry, which the Maliki government rejected today. Of course, the ministry is the way it is because Shiites and Sunnis remain unreconciled, so we’re back to the central problem of sectarian reconciliation. Until that’s magically fixed, it looks like you occupy a country with the Iraqi National Police you have, not the Iraqi National Police you might want or wish to have at a later time.
