Tariq al-Hashimi, one of Iraq's two vice-presidents, thinks he has an answer to one of Washington's greatest headaches: how to create a capable Iraqi army in double-quick time.
In a speech today at Chatham House, the Sunni politician called for the reintroduction of whole units of the Saddam Hussein-era Iraqi army to be reformed.
Paul Bremer, former head of the coalition authority in Iraq, has long been criticised for disbanding the Iraqi army too quickly, with some arguing that the decision boosted the Sunni insurgency. Mr Bremer has said he was made a "fall guy" by the Pentagon and that the decision to disband the army was approved by Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld.
Today, Dr Hashimi said that bringing back old Iraqi units would "get rid of the sectarian discrimination" which, he says, exists at the moment as recruitment centres favour Shia Muslims and scrutinise applicants' ID documents.
Dr Hashimi, who had two brothers and a sister murdered by Shia death squads last year, said he had confidence in UK and US military trainers, who were helping the Iraqis.
But he argued that reinstated old Iraqi units could be ready to provide professional troops in "two to three months", in contrast to the longer time spans involved when creating units from scratch.
Bringing in the old units would quicken the day when UK and US soldiers could be replaced by a "patriotic, professional Iraqi army" and the coalition personnel could "return to their families", Dr Hashimi told the audience.
He said yesterday, when he held talks at Downing Street with Tony Blair, that he believed British troops could withdraw from Iraq within a year if all went well with reforming Iraqi forces.
Today he acknowledged there had been "great mistakes" in the way the post-Saddam security forces had been configured, citing some 6,000 police officers of the Ministry of Interior who have committed crimes. "Many of these officers enjoyed high rank," Dr Hashimi added.
Dr Hashimi's arguments about the old Iraqi army are unlikely to be embraced any time soon by the Shia-dominated government of the prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.
Perhaps, it was no surprise then that another major theme in Dr Hashimi's speech was criticism of the Iraqi constitution which, he said, invested all the power in the prime minister. The presidential council, on which he sits and which has representatives of Iraq's major ethnic/religious groups, would be a better body to run the country, he said.
Dr Hashimi backed George Bush's decision to send an extra 21,500 US troops to Iraq, the majority of them to Baghdad, where the Iraqi vice-president said there was a "manpower" shortage that was damaging security. At least 60 people have been killed in bombings today in Baghdad, as the UN reported that 34,452 Iraqi civilians were killed in 2006.
Despite such a bleak outlook for peace, the Iraqi vice-president said he believed there was a "genuine chance" that Iraq's Shia and Sunni Muslims could eventually set aside their differences, noting they had lived in relative harmony for centuries before Saddam was toppled.
There was, though, a risk of civil war and even worse, with the threat of terrible chaos "passing boundaries", leaving the region in conflagration, he said.
