BAGHDAD (AP) – The Iraqi army and police are growing so fast that their forces enter battle with far less than the usual number of qualified officers, a senior American general told The Associated Press.

While a serious problem, it is not stopping the Iraqis from becoming “good enough” to partner with American troops in fighting the insurgency, Army Lieutenant General James Dubik said Saturday.

“We still have very difficult problems with (Iraqi military unit) leaders – very difficult,” General Dubik said in his first extensive interview since taking command in June of training and equipping Iraqi forces.

Too few have the right level of experience and a nonsectarian attitude, he said. This shortcoming is evident even as tens of thousands of new soldiers and police join the security forces.

The first priority is to get as many soldiers into battle as quickly as possible, General Dubik said.

“What you can’t produce at the same time … (is) leaders. So you end up with units with about half the number of leaders they really need,” he said, referring, for example, to unit leaders such as captains, majors and lieutenant colonels. “But that’s sufficient. It’s not ideal, but it’s sufficient.”

More broadly, General Dubik said he was pleased with the rate of progress in building Iraq’s defenses. He praised the Ministry of Interior in particular for taking steps to weed out officers with sectarian agendas.

General Dubik, who arrived in Baghdad after serving as commander of the Army’s 1st Corps, based at Fort Lewis, Wash., spoke for an hour in his office at the American Embassy on the banks of the Tigris River.

He steered away from questions about the likely duration of the American troop buildup, but made clear that he sees Iraq’s movement toward stability as a long-term project. He said emphatically that he believes the troop buildup, with its more aggressive approach to fighting the insurgency, needs to continue.

“If it stops today, we would give the initiative back to our enemies – Al Qaeda and other extremists,” he said. “It was fought over and died for and there’s no reason to give it back right now.”

“It would be definitely helpful to continue the pace of offensive operations for a while,” he added. “How long that is, I don’t know. And I don’t think anyone knows.”

General Dubik said Iraq should get credit for assembling a mix of competent security forces in a relatively short time and under the pressures of constant combat.

Iraq’s security forces number about 360,000; the total is supposed to reach 390,00 by year’s end. Last December, there were 325,000, which was the Baghdad government’s original goal. The government has since determined, with American agreement, that tens of thousands more are needed quickly.

“You can’t grow a force this fast and have the right number of qualified leaders. You can’t do it,” General Dubik said. “This is a problem now and it will be a problem for a good number of years.”

General Dubik said Iraqi forces are learning quickly through experience gained in the heat of battling insurgents.

“Battlefield survival – professional Darwinism – is teaching very good combat skills … that will ultimately pay off throughout the force,” he said. But, he added, “It’s going to take time to mature.”

General Dubik said the hardest issue in developing Iraqi military leaders is finding enough with combat experience who are willing and able to resist acting on sectarian impulses.

“The skill set is easier to train than the mind set, there’s no doubt,” he said.

The tenor of General Dubik’s remarks suggest he sees a long road ahead for Iraq, with American assistance.

“This society has been drained from three generations of war,” he said, starting with the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, followed by the 1991 Gulf War. “All this really argues against the development of initiative, creativity and leadership, and it’s a deep societal problem that is going to take a while to solve.”

The counterinsurgency effort has managed, at least for now, to drive insurgents from their havens, giving ordinary Iraqis in some areas enough confidence to step forward and help with their own defense, General Dubik said.

That happened this spring in Anbar province, in the west, and more recently in parts of heavily contested Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, he said.

As a result, more people are volunteering to join the Iraqi police, for example, in Fallujah, Ramadi and elsewhere. That has been a boon to Dubik’s mission of creating enough Iraqi forces in the months ahead to shift away from American control.

The process will be gradual, he said, not predicting how long it would take.

General David Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, has developed a war plan that sets a goal of attaining localized security in Baghdad and other key areas by next summer. It also envisions that the Iraqi security forces are capable by the summer of 2009 of sustaining that level of security, with less American support.

General Dubik’s views on how well Iraqi security forces’ are developing will be one factor General Petraeus will take into consideration when he reports to Congress and to President Bush in September on whether the American U.S. war strategy is working and what might be the consequences of changing in the months ahead.