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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (146495)	9/27/2004 10:16:16 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

I'm glad to see you doing your usual bang-up job of making up what I am allegedly saying, bearing as usual no relation whatsoever to anything I wrote. Elsewhere in my perusal, I came up with Fallows' response to another neocon reiteration of the "we're always right" line on that particular issue. James Fallows replies: During much of the time I was interviewing people, mainly face to face and mainly on the East Coast of the United States, Walter Slocombe was in Baghdad. That is why I did not run into him. The reason I didn't seek him out is that my article, unlike some other press reports, did not say that he had personally played a major role in the decision to disband the Iraqi army. Obviously, I went to great lengths to seek out comment from responsible officials in the Pentagon—who, with the notable exception of Douglas Feith, declined to cooperate. Mr. Slocombe's points here are a longer and more detailed version of what Douglas Feith told me: that the dissolution of the army was a recognition of the messy reality that American occupiers confronted just after the war. The Iraqi army had "already disbanded itself," my article quoted Feith as saying. But as the article also pointed out, that judgment was highly controversial at the time, and has remained so in retrospect. CIA and U.S. Army officials, among others, warned about the effect of the sweeping dissolution order. When all the evidence is in, and historians can assess both the reasons for this decision and its long-term effect, it is possible that they will see it the way Mr. Slocombe does: as the best of a bad set of options. For now, what I said in the article remains true: virtually the only people to say this was a good decision are the ones who made it. theatlantic.com My understanding is that the decision to disband the Iraqi Army was taken over Bremer's head, presumably by Friedman's "We know everything. . . " people. I can look that one up too, but life is short, and neocon dogma is depressingly immune to contrary evidence.