However, the Iraqi Police forces were very corrupt.  We had to fire the police force several times (not just the Chief of Police, but all of them).   Usually it was just your basic low-level corruption, but we did catch some of them giving intel to the insurgents, and we even caught a few of them placing IEDs, while still in uniform.

Our biggest problem we had was two related things, they wouldn't place themselves in a position where they would have to fight, especially insurgents.  Most of the time they would just hang out in the police station, and the few times we got them to set up checkpoints in the city, the cops manning the checkpoints were gone when we went to check on them.  A lot of the times they wouldn't even be there 15 minutes after we left them there.  The other problem was Iranian paramilitary forces in the area, I think they were called the Badr brigade.  We were pretty close to the Iranian border, and the Shiites identified themselves pretty strongly with the Iranian shiites (Iran being the dominant country of Shiism) so they would pretty much openly co-operate with the  Badr brigades.  The Badr brigades would set up roadblocks around the city, and the cops would tell them when we would be in the area so they could avoid us.

One night we were on patrol in our Humvees driving circuits around town.  We drove by the police station and there's cops out in front, lights on, doors open, business as usual.  We make a circuit around town and swing by the police station again.  This time, no one's out front, lights are out, doors closed, looks like no ones home. My squad leader tells us to keep alert, somethings not right, and we keep driving.  10 minutes down the road we start receiving mortar fire.  Shots are just landing all around us, but luckily (for us) the rounds keep landing just on the other side of people's houses.  We check around, can't find the mortar.  We head back to base to get some reinforcements (we lived at LSA Anaconda, not with the IPs, so base is 20 to 30 minutes away and we only have 9 guys on patrol at the moment).  Some of our guys meet up with us and we head back to the Iraqi Police station.  When we get there, lights on, cops out front, business as usual.  They claim they didn't hear anything.  We search the station and we find a mortar, unfired mortar rounds, empty cases that had mortar rounds stored.  We detained all the cops on duty, and the police chief, but our higher ups decided to let them go and just settled on firing them from the police force.  To be honest, I have no idea why they decided to fire on us.  It's not like even if they had killed everyone on patrol that we'd go away.

Hopefully a lot of that issue has been worked out. I was deployed from 2003 to 2004, and "combat operations" was just over when I was in Balad, so I would imagine my experience would be a lot different that what your son will experience. I know of a lot of units that are co-habituating with the IPs and other IRaqi forces, and honestly I think the most anti-american elements would have been weeded out by now.  I think the big issue your son will have to deal with is lazy or scared Iraqi forces that won't fight.  They'll act brave when your son is there, but they'll back down from the enemy as soon as your son's back is turned.