Del Wilber, In The Shadow Of The Swords, The Baghdad Police Academy, Casemate, 2020

Wilber, Del, In The Shadow Of The Swords, The Baghdad Police Academy, Casemate, 2020

 

In The Shadow Of The Swords by D.W. Wilber might be one of the only 1^st hand accounts about the Americans’ attempt to rebuild the Iraqi police. Wilber was a former St. Louis police officer who volunteered to be a trainer. It’s a very interesting read even though less than half of it is about the actual police academy. It points out some of the major flaws with the strategy.

 

The majority of Wilber’s story is about his time dealing with other Americans working on Iraq. He went to Virginia for orientation which he found frustrating as he was told literally nothing about what Iraq would be like. When he finally arrived in Baghdad in 2005 it was in between cadet classes so he and the other new trainers had nothing to do for 2 weeks. They spent the time establishing relationships and trying to navigate through the supply situation on the military base they were at such as finding enough toilet paper. There are some good tales and it establishes what the environment was like at the police academy.

 

The best parts of In The Shadows Of The Swords are about all the flaws with the training program. For one Wilber thought some of his colleagues were not qualified for the job. One was an investigator at a prison. Another was a former cop who was working at Home Depot before going to Iraq. A fourth was a teacher with no law enforcement experience and there was fifth that was a former prison guard. On the first day of training one of those individuals got overwhelmed by the complaints of their new cadets and pulled their gun on them. The author didn’t think any of them had the background to train Iraqi police. The problem was the Bush administration was desperate to fill positions and accepted almost anyone.

 

Second there was little oversight of this huge multi-million dollar program. A company was given the job to train Iraqis to become trainers themselves so that they could eventually run the police academy on their own. None of those Americans were on their job. This was part of a general trend of neglect by the administration to keep track of personnel and making sure they were doing what they were supposed to do.

 

Another issue was that there was only 4 hours of instruction per day for the Iraqis for 6 weeks. The fact that the Americans had to go through interpreters slowed this process down tremendously. Wilbur thought 6 weeks was nowhere near enough time and believed a lot of the Iraqis were just being made into cannon fodder to be put out on the streets and be attacked by insurgents.

 

Finally, the author thought this was all due to American leadership that just wanted as many police on the job as possible regardless of their quality. Studies of the U.S. training program found the same fatal flaws for the first years of the occupation of Iraq.

 

Wilber gives a very human story about his experience as a trainer in Iraq. There’s plenty on his comrades and even though the actual program is only a small part of the book there’s a lot of very good criticism made which is supported by research. The U.S. disbanded the Iraqi military and police and then scrambled to rebuild them from scratch with no real strategy. It just wanted as many police and soldiers on duty as possible and that was the only real metric that counted. The fact that most of these Iraqis ended up failing or getting killed didn’t even seem to matter. It would take years for the Americans to realize they had made these strategic mistakes and some of them were never rectified.

 

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