Bring In the Real Cops

LONDON — The police station in Basra has a new coat of paint and officers are wearing baseball caps with the inscription "City of Basra Police" in Arabic. In Baghdad, police are directing traffic again. Elsewhere, vigilantes barricade affluent suburbs and local imams administer their own justice. But lawlessness and looting continue virtually unchecked throughout the country. Although Iraq's postwar security problems are not surprising, their severity could have been less acute if the U.S.-led coalition had remembered the lessons of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo and brought in a police training and monitoring mission, a crucial first step toward democratization.

Recent events in Fallouja, where troops of the 82nd Airborne Division killed 16 demonstrators, tragically illustrate the need to activate as soon as possible a civilian police force that can truly protect and serve. Military police are unsuitable for this kind of training. It must come instead from civilian police working in societies where the rule of law informs their activities. This approach worked in Bosnia and Kosovo, which makes the coalition's apparent failure to learn from that experience even more astonishing.

The policing now on the ground in Iraq is perverse. Iraqis who believed that the feared and hated police force of Saddam Hussein's regime was history must now think again. The rearmed Iraqi cops are, at best, merely corrupt and, at worst, thugs trained by a totalitarian regime. The fact that the reborn Iraqi cops have captured some of the former regime's most-wanted officials is less evidence of their lost allegiance to Hussein than of their keenness to serve the new master. Coalition officials say they want Iraqis to put the country together again. As far as policing is concerned, that doesn't seem to be working, and Iraqis are decrying the lack of security.

When NATO tanks rolled into Kosovo in 1999, a police-training advisory mission was right behind them. The Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the war in Bosnia in 1995, created an International Police Task Force to retrain the police there to embrace the rule of law in a democracy. But in Afghanistan, where no such force was sent in, a lack of security continues to be one of the most pressing problems and is slowing reconstruction efforts.