[meandog]

On May 8, 2003, before I left for Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld gave me a memo titled “Principles for Iraq-Policy Guidelines” that specified that the coalition “will actively oppose Saddam Hussein’s old enforcers — the Baath Party, Fedayeen Saddam, etc.” and that “we will make clear that the coalition will eliminate the remnants of Saddam’s regime.” The next day Mr. Rumsfeld told me that he had sent the “Principles” paper to the national security adviser and the secretary of state.

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.

[lonestar67]

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.

[KarlInOhio]

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.

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.)

[LS]

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.

[LM_Guy]

Rumsfeld & Wolfowitz screwed up this war big-time and we all are paying the price for it.

[neverdem]

thanks, bfl