Posted on 09/06/2007 8:27:35 AM PDT by lduucckkyy
September 6, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
How I Didn’t Dismantle Iraq’s Army
By L. PAUL BREMER III
“The Iraqi Army of the future cannot be an extension of the present army, which has been made into a tool of dictatorship.” — Report by the Department of State’s Future of Iraq Project, May 2002
IT has become conventional wisdom that the decision to disband Saddam Hussein’s army was a mistake, was contrary to American prewar planning and was a decision I made on my own. In fact the policy was carefully considered by top civilian and military members of the American government. And it was the right decision.
By the time Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003, the Iraqi Army had simply dissolved. On April 17 Gen. John Abizaid, the deputy commander of the Army’s Central Command, reported in a video briefing to officials in Washington that “there are no organized Iraqi military units left.” The disappearance of Saddam Hussein’s old army rendered irrelevant any prewar plans to use that army. So the question was whether the Coalition Provisional Authority should try to recall it or to build a new one open to both vetted members of the old army and new recruits. General Abizaid favored the second approach.
In the weeks after General Abizaid’s recommendation, the coalition’s national security adviser, Walter Slocombe, discussed options with top officials in the Pentagon, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. They recognized that to recall the former army was a practical impossibility because postwar looting had destroyed all the bases.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Well, Paul, listening to Rumsfeld was your first mistake...the second was believing that Baathists would not again make good soldiers (because former SS Nazis once did in the reconstituted army of West Germany)...the trick was to weed out the hard core Sadaamists, leave the lukewarm Baathists, and have them swear the oath to their country instead of Sadaam.
I am glad Bremer and others are fighting back on the “failed war” meme.
Conservative and liberal hacks alike have taken to absurd characterizations of the Iraq war which has also been a great success.
Conservatives deserve to lose with they are not even willing to defend blatant successes like the Iraq war. Obsessed with some pathological sense of identity that requires ‘purifying” the party, some conservatives have done real damage to their own interests by agreeing to bad critiques of the Iraq war.
Saddam Hussein was a terrible ruthless dictator who used chemical weapons on his own people and wanted the world to believe he would increase his dangerous stockpiles. He is gone from this earth and Iraq is rapidly becoming the envy of the Arab world.
The pundits will soon eat W’s dust and I will relish the day.
I've attended talks by a major (may be a lt. colonel now) in Central Command who blames most of the problems in Iraq on Bremer. We made no attempt to call back the Iraqi Army and get them on a payroll and on our side. The only people willing to pay them were those interested in having them cause us trouble. A couple of times he needed some Iraqi troops, so he contacted the old commander and executive officer and got 85% of the unit back together within a couple of days.
If we had recalled the Iraqi military, got as many of them back into the barracks, paid them better than they were under Saddam and worried about de-Baathifying them later, they would have been available for both security and reconstruction work (and far cheaper than our contractors).
As it was, we had a bunch of armed, newly poor people with families to support. It would have been far cheaper both in money and lives to have paid them.
(No, I won't name him. One of the conditions for attending the talk was to not refer to him by name.)
Huh? You have a few nuts like Buchanan and Paul. Other than that, conservatives are the only group that still support the war. You might notice that the Warners, Hagels, and their ilk are the wobbly ones (swaying with the breeze)--and they are hardly conservatives. The RINO's are working to stab Bush on the war much more seriously than the tiny fringe of conservatives (if you can call Buchanan and Paul conservatives) that oppose the war.
Bremer’s book is very interesting. It is all about people he met with and worked with. He worked to reach out to a broad spectrum of Iraqis and bring them into leadership to create a provisional government. That should work out a lot better than military rule ever does.
I think you are largely correct. Coming from Ohio I can definitely identify with your point about the RINOS. Nonetheless, I wish conservatives— I guess in some sense neo conservatives would defend with more vigor. There seems to be some willingness to throw Rumsfeld overboard and view Petraus as the now proper strategy.
I do think taht Petraus work is good but it is the brillian response to a Democratic congressional win. Change course by upping the ante. That was shrewd and helped expose the Dems as empty suits and plummeted their popularity into the basement.
It was EXACTLY the right thing to do. Rummy was right. You cannot expect the Shiite population to respond to an institution that was so associated with the Saddam era. It would have been akin to bringing in entire units of Confederate soldiers to “protect” blacks in the South.
The minute they admitted there were no WMDs in Iraq, the PR war was 90% lost.
We did exactly the same thing with the Iraqi army that we did with the Wehrmacht.
If you thought our guys were vulnerable with the disbanded army, it would have been 100 times worse with "embedded" al-Qaeda getting into the Green Zone on a regular basis as officers in the Iraqi army.
You have been taking your fatuous idiot pills havent you ?
On your Home page I can see just how sick you are...Maybe you dont remember but Ronald Reagan was considered “The idiot” in his day
Yea and didnt Eisenhower screw up WW2?
Reverse BDS.
Quite right
—except that it is Bin Laden and Zarqawi who screwed up and now Al Qaeda and all their allies who are paying the price for it.
Whassa matter Rummydummy? Are you still reeling over the "Der Autopen's" ouster and don't have anyone to give a mancrush to any longer...aww-w-w-w!
Yep you proved my point
thanks, bfl
BINGO!
We have a winner...put down your markers...
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