3:00 P.M. EDT 
Real Audio of Briefing
MR. DENIG: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the Washington Foreign Press Center. I'm very pleased this afternoon to be able to introduce to you Mr. Walt Slocombe, the Senior Advisor for Defense and Security Sector Affairs for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.
Mr. Slocombe has been in Iraq since May of this year, and has been instrumental in structuring and establishing the new Iraqi army. He has been working closely with the Coalition forces as well as with the Governing Council in this implementation.
Prior to this assignment in Iraq, Mr. Slocum was the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 1994 to 2001. His complete biography is available up front. Mr. Slocombe is representative of the many senior advisors who are taking time from their civilian careers and positions to assist in the global war on terrorism and to advise the Iraqi Governing Council and the new Iraqi ministers.
Mr. Slocombe will have an opening statement to make, and after that will be delighted to take your questions.
Mr. Slocombe.
MR. SLOCOMBE: Thank you, and thank you all for coming.
As was just said, my primary responsibilities in the CPA have to do with the Iraqi military and national security structure. The old Iraqi military simply disintegrated with the end of the major fighting in mid-April. Not only did everybody go home, but they also took with them almost everything worth moving; and what they didn't take was largely looted by people who came in afterward.
So the old Iraqi army has simply disintegrated and dissolved itself. It was then formally -- as I'm sure you know -- it was then formally dissolved by an order of the CPA and at the same time that we entered that order, we also announced that we would be creating a new Iraqi army as soon as possible.
That force would be the -- not the complete military of a new and free Iraq, but the foundation, the seed from which that force will grow over time. And it'll be a very different army from the old army. It'll be non-political, professional, representative of the country as a whole, and a force for national unity instead of an instrument of one ethnic group being dominant.
It will be controlled by an elected government within a legal and constitutional framework and its mission will be the military defense of the country; not securing the power of the leadership or threatening Iraq's neighbors.
Also, and very significant from the Iraqi point of view, it will have to be a great deal smaller than the old Iraqi army. The old Iraqi army had almost 500,000 people on the payroll. That's as big as the American army, in a country a tenth the population and much less than that in terms of GDP.
But the Iraqi army, in addition to these characteristics, in the future will also need to be militarily effective because Iraq lives in a dangerous neighborhood and as a major factor in the region will need to be able to see to its own security.
There are really two elements to the effort, which we have underway in the CPA with respect to the Iraqi military. The first is the training of what we're calling the new Iraqi army, that is the initial units of the armed forces of the future Iraq; and second, the creation by the Governing Council – with our assistance -- of a whole new system of national security management and national security and military institutions.
Let me begin with a little bit on the new Iraqi army, as such. The new Iraqi army began training the first battalion around the first of August, and that first battalion will be commissioned and enter operational service on October 4th, the training being now about three-quarters completed.
The training takes place at a place called Kirkush, which is an old Iraqi military base about 80 kilometers northeast of Baghdad and about 30 kilometers from the Iranian border, which we reconditioned and are using as the training facility. As battalions go through, we will expand the capacity of that facility and have something like four battalions ready and operational by early next year.
The actual day-to-day training is being done by U.S. contract trainers with very close Coalition military oversight. The military oversight is done by an organization called the Coalition Military Assistance Training Team, which is commanded by an American, Major-General Paul Eaton, who was, until he took up this assignment, the commander of infantry training for the United States Army. So we have sent our best expert on that issue.
His deputy is British, and his staff includes officers from a variety of Coalition countries. The force is, of course, a volunteer force -- in contrast to the old army, which had notoriously a very heavy Sunni-domination of the officer corps and, reflecting the population of the country, very heavily Shia in the enlisted ranks. The ethnic distribution of the forces is roughly in line with that of the country as a whole, importantly including a substantial Kurdish participation.
As the units are ready, they will go out and perform military missions, things like territorial defense, convoy route and point security. They will operate under Iraqi officers with an Iraqi command structure, but they will be under the operational control, as with other Coalition forces in the country, of Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez who is the commander of the Coalition Joint Task Force, which commands the military forces of the Coalition. That arrangement will continue pending the transfer of full security responsibility for security factors to the Iraqi Government.
The units will be motorized infantry. They will be relatively light. Virtually all the equipment will have to be acquired because there are no significant stockpiles of serviceable captured equipment.
Our original plan had been to train 27 battalions, that's three divisions' worth, over the course of two years. We now believe it is possible to do that within a single year by focusing heavily on leader training and using the pool of soldiers who've already had basic training from their prior military experience to form effective units.
That will require a substantial investment in facilities and equipment in order to give the force the capability that it needs. The force, in addition to the basic composition of light infantry, will include some armor and artillery, and also a very limited air mobility component: helicopters and C-130s, and what is, in effect, a Coast Guard to provide riverine and littoral protection for the country.
We are confident this is not the end of the process of creating an Iraqi military. I think it's virtually certain that the future Iraqi Government will decide that it wants a larger force. However, it is a beginning and it provides a foundation. And the longer-term decisions, which involve pretty serious issues of commitment of resources, will be made by the Iraqi Government. We will also be setting up an outfit we're calling the Defense Support Agency, which will be a civilian organization staffed by Iraqis, which will provide the logistics and administrative support for the units as they come on line.
In addition to developing the force, we will be working with the Iraqis on the development of military and national security institutions. That includes the creation, eventually, of a ministry of defense, which will provide a legal and constitutionally based structure for civilian control and oversight, will run the typical MOD functions of resource and personnel management and allocation, and in general will provide civilian staff support.
In addition, Iraq will need to create a national security policy and a national security strategy and make fundamental decisions, for example, to what degree, if at all, does it want to rely for its security on mutual-security, mutual-defense relationships with outside countries in the region; and more broadly, how do they want to set up national security institutions for making decisions on foreign policy; how do they want to handle the very sensitive issue of the linkage between law enforcement internally and protecting against threats that are basically external? And in addition, and very important, how do they assure public accountability and parliamentary oversight? This process will be complicated because of the sensitive politics of Iraq's checkered history on these scores in the past, not just under the previous regime, but long before that. And therefore, these decisions have to be made by Iraqis. They will not be made by the Coalition, they will not be made by Americans; they will be made by Iraqis.
We will stand ready to assist and support in whatever way we can be useful -- even ranging from such technical things as providing training and access to experts on difficult models for military and ministries of defense, to more fundamental issues of how they want to create the constitutional and parliamentary oversight. But the central point is that these longer-term decisions are for Iraqis to make, not for the Coalition.
This effort is a part of our overall program of as rapidly as possible assisting the Iraqis to create the institutions and structures so that they can take responsibility for their own society, first of all, for their own security, but also for their own economic progress, their own political progress, and the structuring of a democratic and fair state for all the people of Iraq.
That's an introduction to the issue, and I'll be glad to take your questions.
MR. DENIG: Let me remind you, please, to use the microphone, introduce yourself and your news organization. We'll start with the gentleman right here.
QUESTION: My name is Tammam Al-Barazi from Al Watan Al Arabi Magazine. Sir, at the same podium, Kenneth Pollack, who was in the National Security Council criticized heavily the abolishing of the Iraqi army and consider it a big mistake. That's given that what he said. Secondly, today in The New York Times they quoted Defense Department officials saying Iraqis' bitterness is called bigger threat than terror. Given these two factors, what do you think that the new Iraqi army can do toward these two factors, which are --
MR. SLOCOMBE: Well first of all, let me address this issue about the dissolution of the Iraqi army. I have great respect for Ken Pollack, but on this particular issue he's wrong. The Coalition Provisional Authority did not dissolve the Iraqi army. The Iraqi army dissolved itself with a certain amount of encouragement from the Coalition military forces, which were advancing against it.
There were simply no organized military formations when the major fighting in Tikrit after the fall of Baghdad came to an end. A lot of people expected there would be. There would be divisions, which had essentially sat out the war or had gone back in the garrison. But those simply didn't exist.
So it's not a question of preserving a force. So the critics say, "Well, we should have recalled it." The problem with that is, it was a conscript army -- a conscript army in which the conscripts were badly treated, barely paid, barely fed. And the one group in Iraq, which has been unanimous in its endorsement of something, which the CPA has done, is the conscripts, all of whom say it was great to be released from military service; a reaction which is probably not exclusive to Iraqi conscripts under the conditions. So that there's no reason to believe that any significant number of actual enlisted soldiers would have responded to a call back to the colors.
Moreover, the facilities were completely destroyed. We have had to invest millions of dollars in the reconstruction of facilities so that there is a place for the new Iraqi army to operate. There was, in April and May, no place for the old Iraqi army to have operated from if it had wanted to.
I think it's also important to understand that while we have not tried to reconstitute the old army, as such, members of that army have in no way been discriminated against, with the single exception of people who were at very high ranks in the Baath party, or who worked in the inner circle of security organizations: in the Special Republican Guard, in the Mahabharata, in the Intelligence Service and in the sort of inner circle that protected and sustained the regime.
We have the records. The bizarre fact about the Iraqi army was that their personnel records didn't bother to record at central level the conscripts, but it did keep records of party affiliations and the party awards of military officers, so we know exactly how many there were and who they were. They were only about 8,000 out of a commissioned officer force of about 80,000, and a non-commissioned of about 130,000. Only about 8,000 were at these top ranks in the Baath party organization, or were military officers who were working for the intelligence services, so that the number who were affected by these rules is very limited.
Moreover, the old Iraqi army was unsustainably large. I made the point that it was 500,000. That is a bizarrely too large army for a country that size. And moreover, it was absurdly top-heavy. The old Iraqi army had at least 11,000 officers on the payroll of the rank of brigadier or above. The American army has 300, a few. It was almost as bad at the colonel level. There were 14,000 colonels. That's enough for a whole armored division. The American army has about 3,500 colonels. The equivalent ranks in the American military are larger because of the [various] services, but the American army is about 500,000; the Iraqi military would be about 500,000. So that the great majority of military personnel, and we're talking about officers, the conscripts went on with their lives.
The great majority of the officers are going to have to find something else to do in any event. In order to ease the transition, and reflecting that they were an important, and in their minds at least, respected part of the society, we did decide to pay what we call a stipend -- on an interim basis, but with an end date to be determined not by us, but by the Governing Council -- to pay a stipend which will allow these officers to maintain a modest but decent standard of living while they adjust to the new realities. And those payments have been made. They have been made to virtually everybody eligible, and I think have been very satisfactory in convincing the former officer corps as a class that they have an interest in the success of the process. So that's on the issue of the old Iraqi army.
On the question of where the threat lies, I don't know. I haven't seen the story you referred to and I don't know what the individual is. I think it is clear that the threats which we face in the country are, first of all, from people who are, one way or another, affiliated with the old regime, but in the sort of clumsy jargon of the military they call "former regime loyalists," who are people who believe that, one way or another, they can create conditions under which, if not Saddam, personally, at least the Baath party can come back and run the country to the great advantage of the people who were at high ranks in the Baath party. And that, I think, is the primary source of the organization that is making these attacks, and, in general, disrupting the reconstruction effort.
Second, it is clear that there is a substantial terrorist element from outside, of foreign elements of various kinds. There may be some de facto alliances between the former Baath party people and these organizations. I think one of the things we have learned is that these organizations are prepared to make common cause with other organizations that they have almost no ideological affinity with.
There also is a substantial amount of just ordinary crime aggravated by the fact that Saddam let, as a sort of general jail delivery in October of 2002, and at least at the time I saw the figures, something like a third of the people whom the police were arresting for ordinary criminal charges, are people who would had been released from prison the year before.
Now, it is certainly true that there are occasional incidents in which -- this business with the firing in Fallujah is a perfect example -- in which mistakes are made, in the confusion innocent people are killed, and I am sure that that does create some resentment and some ill feeling.
The military is making a major effort to try to make sure that it uses the appropriate amount of force necessary, but to be as discriminate as possible in the use of that force. If somebody at the Pentagon is saying that this kind of resentment is a bigger issue than terrorism or former regime loyalists, they're living in a different world from the one I live in.
QUESTION: Tattamangalam Parasuram, Press Trust of India. Sir, you mentioned that the Iraqi army, that the rubric simply disappeared. I was wondering whether an army, which disappeared so suddenly, unexpectedly, can reconstitute itself when the Americans leave? And, if so, do you see any future problems?
Secondly, you mentioned that the new army started training in August and it will be ready in two months. I don't know of any army --
MR. SLOCOMBE: No, the first battalion.
QUESTION: Even the first battalion. I don't know.
MR. SLOCOMBE: The first battalion will be ready.
QUESTION: I don't know of any army in the world, which can be trained in two months. How do you do that?
MR. SLOCOMBE: The standard period for basic training in the American army is about two months. These are all people who -- virtually all -- something like 70, 80 percent, are people who either in the old Iraqi army or in the Kurdish Peshmerga had previous military experience. And, obviously, there will be additional training following the two month period, but two months is an adequate period of time to do the initial training and form up a unit, and then continue.
Military organizations train on a continuing basis, and that advanced training will certainly go on for the Iraqi army. I just want to emphasize, it's the first battalion of about 700 people that will commission early in October.
For the reasons that I stated, the old Iraqi army is not going to come back. It doesn't exist anymore. It depended -- in particular, for keeping the conscripts in place -- on the existence of a system of power and control, which disappeared with the collapse of the regime.
And, you know, everybody -- Iraq is a country with universal conscription, so in some sense, if you were physically fit and couldn't bribe your way out of it, you were in the army. And in that sense, every Iraqi male, virtually, is ex-military. But other -- but that's not how -- that's not a critical factor in the definition of their existence.
The officer corps, which is what we're talking about, is on the order of about 80,000 commissioned officers, of whom a substantial percentage were probably de facto retired. For rather complicated reasons, it was not a good idea to retire from the Iraqi army. So as near as we can tell -- and it's one of the reasons for this absurd top-heavy structure -- those people were kept on the nominal active roles. You'd go down and see them when they were collecting their stipends, and there are lieutenant colonels which are well into their sixties and seventies, so they obviously were de facto retired.
I don’t think this will be an issue. I think the great majority of the Iraqi population wants to move on. And they want restoration of Iraqi sovereignty, they want public services to be restored; they want crime to be reduced; they want all of these things, which are perfectly legitimate, and things we need to work harder on. But with the exception of what I think is probably not more than a few thousand people who are causing the trouble, nobody wants Saddam back, nobody wants -- and particularly, if you talk outside the sort of Sunni-dominated areas, nobody wants Saddam back. Nobody wants to go back to the old system.
MR. DENIG: Let's take Italy on the far left back there.
QUESTION: Thanks. Giampiero Gramaglia, the Italian News Agency, ANSA. For the training of the new military, Iraq military, are you asking for specific contributions from your allies? And which kind of response did you have so far?
MR. SLOCOMBE: Training on a day-to-day basis, the drill sergeant, if you will, the drill instructors are contracted, private citizens. They're almost all retired military. This was done on a basis of a competitive bid for which foreign companies -- and there are a handful of foreign companies that do this, as well -- were eligible. The winner was an American company, although I believe there are a few Europeans who are also, who are employees of the company. It's called Vinnell.
The oversight of that is an international military organization, which is part of my office. As I said, it's commanded by an American officer. His deputy is British. He has -- Spanish, Czech, Romanian, we're getting a Pole. We're getting an Italian -- officers on the staff. So it is an international effort.
As we go into the future, we may well be asking Coalition partners to provide military officers to help with the training. And we've had some indication that they'd be willing to do that.
MR. DENIG: Okay, let's go to Russia on the far right here.
QUESTION: Thank you. Pavel Vanichkin, TASS News Agency of Russia. I've got a couple of questions. The first one is, you said that the new arms and equipment should be acquired. Are we talking about American equipment, or, perhaps, you will look to the -- some foreign equipment, Russia, for example?
MR. SLOCUM: Well, they use AK-47s.
QUESTION: Yeah.
MR. SLOCOMBE: They didn't buy them from Russia, but the Russians seem to have licensed people all over the world to make AK-47s. So we bought a stock of something like 40,000 AK-47s brand new that had been in an Eastern European country and were owned by a third country, which no longer needed them.
No, we expect that we will, with respect to this equipment -- we have on the street now a request for bids on a whole variety of military equipment to equip the first few battalions. And we expect that they will probably not all be American, by any means. Most of it, as I say, will very likely either be commercial -- trucks, for example, that are just commercial trucks, or will be excess or reconditioned equipment.
QUESTION: And, if I may, you talk about three future divisions, how many people will be there?
And the follow-up is, Iraq is located in the very dangerous region. They've got Iran not very far away, and it's safe to say that Iran and Iraq are not big friends. Aren't you afraid that this light infantry wouldn't be enough to face the future problems after the eventual withdrawal of American troops?
MR. SLOCOMBE: I think I said explicitly that we expect that Iraq will, in fact, have substantially more than these three divisions. This is the beginning of a process, not the end. Now, we expect that they will, in fact, have a larger force, and that it will not be limited to light infantry.
On the other hand, Iraq is going to have to make some pretty serious decisions about resource allocation. This afternoon, the Administration will send up to the Hill a request for $87 billion in supplemental assistance. Now, $65 billion of that is for the support of American military operations. But the other $22 billion is for a whole range of support for Iraqi reconstruction. And that will make a huge step forward. We anticipate, however, just a scale that didn't show the resource problem.
Iraq, next year, will do well to have between $10 and $15 billion dollars in oil revenues. You can do the math yourself. Even if you figure it gets up to 3 million barrels a day at $25 a barrel -- which is a high price and a high production rate, higher than Iraq has sustained for a long time -- that produces something like $25 billion in resources.
Iraq is going to have to make some hard choices about where they want to put resources. So our view has been that we will provide this as a foundation and every expectation that they will do more in the future, but that rather than commit them to jet planes and armored divisions, we will get a process started and create a framework, leaving it for the Iraqis to decide in the future how much they want to go forward with on their own.
I certainly agree three divisions is not enough to meet all of Iraq's military requirements. One of the other issues that they will have to decide, in addition to what degree they want to create a larger military and what kind of a military they want to create, is, to what degree do they want to enter into mutual security arrangements with other countries, alliances, if you will; with other countries of the region; conceivably if the United States is interested, with the United States; with other coalition countries, which obviously has an impact on what kind of military they'll require of their own.
But to repeat, we are not in any sense trying to limit Iraq to three divisions or to light infantry. I guess you asked how many people. Our expectation is, it depends. You can't get it just by multiplying 27 times the 800 or so who are in a battalion, because as you begin to create brigades and divisions and headquarters, you get a more substantial support. Our expectation is that the force will be, the three-division force, will be on the order of something like 30,000 to 40,000.
QUESTION: My name is Gabor Horvath; I'm from the Hungarian Daily Nepszabudsag. Sir, what are the current plans to strengthen the Iraqi police force? And have you given up on the project of sending them to Hungary for basic training?
MR. SLOCOMBE: I'm afraid I'm going to pass on that because my responsibilities do not extend to the police, as such. And there are people who do, but that's not my direct responsibility. Well, having said that, let me give you a very general answer. We have brought back into service something like 35,000 former Iraqi police who were getting short-term training of about 3 weeks in country. That's not nearly a big enough police force for a country the size of Iraq.
Our plan is to recruit new entrants, many of whom will probably be former military, to recruit new entrants so that the force will be on the order of 65 to 75,000, and to try to train them with a much more extensive training period of a couple of months, which again, is about typical for training basic police skills -- train them probably outside the country, although conceivably in Iraq. One option is Hungary. There are other conceivable options, and frankly, I'm not sure what the state of the negotiations and discussions is.
QUESTION: Tammam Al-Barazi from Al Watan Al Arabi Magazine, again. There was here in The New York Times, they said that the prisoner which been taken, like 4,400 security detainees. That's a follow-up on -- you said that most of the people who are maybe resisting the American are from the old regime. So they said that 4,400, they are security detainee, while 10,000 prisoners, general. Can you give us an idea of these security detainee?
MR. SLOCOMBE: I don't have the exact figures in my head, but there are various categories of detainees. There are still a certain number of people who were captured during the war who are prisoners of war. Most of the POWs have been released. But there are still some who haven't been released.
Second, there are a lot of people who are arrested for ordinary crimes. I mean, 10,000 prisoners sounds like a lot, but this is a country of 28 million people, so that there are a lot of people who were arrested for ordinary crimes. What we are in process of doing is setting up a system where, as rapidly as possible, we get those people out of a Coalition detention facility and into the Iraqi justice system, into the Iraqi criminal justice system.
We have reconditioned a couple of prisons. We've set up a court system. We've set up a prosecutorial system. Iraq will be one of the first countries in the region, if not the first, to have a genuinely independent judiciary, so that we are trying to transfer the criminal cases to an Iraqi structure.
Under international law, the Coalition is entitled to hold people as what are called "security detainees," that is, detainees, people who are being detained because they are -- because of security considerations. Under international law, they are entitled to a periodic review of their status -- I believe it's every six months, but you have to check with somebody who practices in this area to be sure -- that they're entitled to a periodic review of their status. And we are trying to go through and make sure that we have a system which balances the legitimate interest in quarantining some people for security reasons against the obvious undesirability of holding people where they're neither going to be prosecuted for a crime, nor is there any particular security reason to hold them.
That's a complicated process. Communications are uncertain. You go in any prison in the world and nobody will tell you they're there because they're supposed to be. You've got a lot of people who have various complaints about why they shouldn't be in detention.
We are trying to set up a system, which will move through this process faster. We also recognize that another legitimate issue is largely a product of the problems of communication and so on in the country that it can often be harder than it should be for families to know for sure what's happened to somebody. But we're trying to work that problem as hard as we can. But that is essentially the story on the detention.
QUESTION: Dmitri Sidorov, Kommersant. Now, following up the Russian weapons in Iraq question, do you have an estimate on how much Iraqi army will need to spend in the future, let's say maybe in a year or two, to purchase a little bit more up to date weapons compared to the Russian weapons which they were, old Russian weapons, which they were buying for quite a long period of time?
MR. SLOCOMBE: I don't knock Russian weapons, they may buy them on the -- we'll have to buy them -- whatever we buy will have to be bought on the international arms market. To be frank, I would expect that there will be considerable interest on the part of other countries that have stocks of former Soviet-style stuff, not necessarily all made in the Soviet Union.
We're talking about stuff, which is made in lots and lots of countries. We're not talking about Joint Strike Fighters, or Abrahm's tanks. We're talking about personal gear. A lot of this will be made in Iraq. After all, we had one interesting exchange where we were talking to an Iraqi clothes manufacturer, and we said "Can you get us 2,000 uniforms by August 1st?" This was back in July. He looked at us as if we were crazy. He said "Look, I used to equip an army of a million men, of course I can make you 2,000 uniforms in a month."
So a certain amount of stuff will come from inside the country, and we will prefer to buy inside when we can. Otherwise, as much as humanly possible, we will do it for the best price that we can get on the international market by competitive bids. And as I say, there is a request for proposals out now for quite a substantial chunk of equipment.
Now as to the amounts, I'm afraid I'm going to duck on this because the amount is actually in the supplemental [budget request], which is being released this afternoon, and for reasons you will understand, the people who are in charge of the supplemental will release the detail, and not me.
QUESTION: Do you know if any negotiations are going on with the Russian Defense Ministry or any of Russian companies supplying -- who were known to supply Iraq with the stuff we are talking about? I mean in regard to just, for Iraq to purchase more military, whatever it might be, stuff, but --
MR. SLOCOMBE: The way the process works, we have put out requests for proposals, and if Russian companies want to bid, they're free to bid. Now I don't want to be misleading. We will prefer Iraqi suppliers. And insofar as we are using American taxpayer money, we will abide by whatever rules Congress chooses to impose.
Insofar as we are using Iraqi funds, we have a commitment to our Coalition partners that there will be no "buy American" preference when we're talking about Iraqi funds.
When the Australians put up money, the Australians write the rules. When the British put up money, the British write the rules. When the American taxpayer puts up the money, the American Congress writes the rules. But my strong sense is that a lot of what we will be doing is buying used or excess equipment, and then that the real issue is who's going to recondition it?
MR. DENIG: Okay, let's go back to India.
QUESTION: Parasuram again. Now that you are creating a new police force, what steps are you taking to ensure that the training is modern, because, as you know, in many countries, not only Iraq, the police do not know how to get information from somebody interrogated except by third-degree measures. And I was wondering whether you are taking any special measures to see that now that your, your aim is to create a moral democracy, to make sure that the training is adequate and modern?
MR. SLOCOMBE: The short answer to that is yes, we are doing that. You're right, it is a serious challenge, particularly to the degree that we are in the position as we are now, largely, of relying on people who were in the old police force. The training emphasizes human rights, policing in a democracy, policing in cooperation with the community, which is the best way to do it in police terms, even aside from any moral or legal considerations, and also modern police techniques.
It also requires that the police change the way they act. The tradition in Iraq was that the police sat in the police station and people came to them with problems and complaints and particularly if you then grease the palms of policemen sufficiently, they might do something about it.
What we've been able to do, actually, is to get the police out patrolling, to get them out working in the community, and that will be much more effective. But you're absolutely right. The problem of training in both modern police techniques and in avoiding the kind of abuses that you talk about is a big challenge. You know, it's a challenge in almost every country's police force, including this one, to have proper training for the police, but it's one of the things we will be working on. And it's one of the reasons that we think it's valuable to have a big intake of new police over the next year or so, who will get more extensive training that will allow more of this to be done. But it is a serious issue, you're quite right.
MR. DENIG: Well, thank you very much, Mr. Slocombe. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
MR. SLOCOMBE: Thank you.
