(I wish they'd make up their mind .... Iraq had a strong trained army until the US moved in ...)

Newfound Iraqi confidence pleases, worries US

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For now, the new assertiveness by generals such as Hameed, who commands all Iraqi soldiers in the western part of the capital, is welcomed.

"They have a self-confidence now that they didn't have when (I) first arrived" last fall, Hammond, the top commander of U.S. forces in Baghdad, said in an interview. The Iraqi army, he said, was largely limited as recently as last winter to manning checkpoints and "they were struggling with that." What changed?

Hammond and nearly a dozen other American military officers said in a series of Associated Press interviews this past week that the key was the Iraqis' sudden and largely unexpected leap into hard battle in Basra in March, followed by offensives in the northern city of Mosul and the Sadr City section of Baghdad ending in May.

The Iraqi army faltered initially in the Basra offensive, but the outcome seemed transformative for the Iraqis.

"They look different, they act different," Hammond said. "They're no longer looking to us for approval."

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Army Col. Mark Spindler, commander of the 18th Military Police Brigade, said in an interview Saturday that some of his colleagues worry that when the Iraqis act on their own, the U.S.-Iraqi partnership is breaking down. "No, it's not breaking down. It's changing. That's progress," Spindler said.

The Iraqis, too, recognize that the dynamic between their leaders and the U.S. commanders is changing. "They (the Americans) want us to rely on ourselves," Maj. Gen. Ali Hadi Hussein al-Yaseri, commander of all patrol police in Baghdad province, said in an interview Saturday in his headquarters. "We are now doing that."

Which raises this question: When will the Americans know that the Iraqis are ready to handle security entirely on their own?

"The Iraqis are going to have to decide. When do they believe they are where they need to be, on their terms?" Hammond said. He said one test of their readiness will be when Shiite militias, whose leaders he says largely fled to Iran and other countries after being pushed out of Sadr City, return to fight again.

He predicts that fight is coming. "I wouldn't give up Sadr City like that, and I don't think they will. I'm sure they won't," he said. "They'll come back."

Hammond did not address the possibility of the Iraqi army breaking out of the control of its civilian overseers, but some private U.S. military analysts have said in recent weeks that they see a risk of a coup.
"It's something that's being talked about" among some U.S. government officials, said Stephen Biddle, an Iraq watcher at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. He traveled in Iraq in early June and returned with a largely positive view of security developments, tempered by concern about remaining sectarian tensions.

Iraq has vastly increased the size of its forces over the past year, now totaling 566,000 in the army and police. In May 2007 that number was 337,000.

For now, in Biddle's view, the presence of a large American military contingent mitigates against the possibility of a military coup.

"If we were to leave you could easily imagine a situation in which the military as the most effective institution in society decides to take over," Biddle said. "The parliament is the least respected institution in the society."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080713/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_new_swagger