June 2, 2003: Bremer Approves Plan to Send in Foreign Police Trainers

Paul Bremer approves a plan to recruit as many as 6,600 police advisers to help build and train an indigenous police force of 50,000 to 80,000 Iraqis from scratch. DynCorp—which received a $22 million contract to establish a criminal justice system a few months earlier (see Early 2003)—is to recruit police trainers from the US and various foreign countries. But over the next six months, only 50 police advisers will arrive in the country. A State Department official will later blame this failure on the program being insufficiently funded. [New York Times, 5/21/2006]