While O’Hanlon and Pollack claimed “many of the corrupt and sectarian Iraqi commanders who once infested the [security] force have been removed,” Cordesman observed the opposite. “The security forces are more divided, facing more problems in terms of alignment with Shi’ite factions than I had expected to see, even for the army.”
Later in the briefing, Cordesman slammed O’Hanlon’s plan calling for a “soft-partition” of Iraq into three distinct regions, stating that such an effort would be “brutal, it is repressive, it kills people, it injures them, it drives them out of their homes, and it drives them out of their country. To talk about this as if it was something that is gentle or nonviolent is simply dishonest.”
Cordesman added: “It is clear, that in some ways our intervention in Iraq has allowed the Sadr militia and Shi’ite extremist groups to operate in terms of sectarian cleansing with more freedom than they had in the past.”
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