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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (159102)	3/14/2005 9:20:16 PM
From: Win Smith	Respond to of 281500

You recall quite selectively, although not surprisingly quite consistently with other W apologists. One account, from theatlantic.com On May 6 the Administration announced that Bremer would be the new U.S. administrator in Iraq. Two weeks into that job Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army and other parts of the Baathist security structure. If the failure to stop the looting was a major sin of omission, sending the Iraqi soldiers home was, in the view of nearly everyone except those who made the decision, a catastrophic error of commission. There were two arguments for taking this step. First, the army had "already disbanded itself," as Douglas Feith put it to me—soldiers had melted away, with their weapons. Second, the army had been an integral part of the Sunni-dominated Baathist security structure. Leaving it intact would be the wrong symbol for the new Iraq—especially for the Shiites, whom the army had oppressed. "These actions are part of a robust campaign to show the Iraqi people that the Saddam regime is gone, and will never return," a statement from Bremer's office said. The case against wholesale dissolution of the army, rather than a selective purge at the top, was that it created an instant enemy class: hundreds of thousands of men who still had their weapons but no longer had a paycheck or a place to go each day. Manpower that could have helped on security patrols became part of the security threat. Studies from the Army War College, the Future of Iraq project, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, to name a few, had all considered exactly this problem and suggested ways of removing the noxious leadership while retaining the ordinary troops. They had all warned strongly against disbanding the Iraqi army. The Army War College, for example, said in its report, "To tear apart the Army in the war's aftermath could lead to the destruction of one of the only forces for unity within the society." "This is not something that was dreamed up by somebody at the last minute," Walter Slocombe—who held Feith's job, undersecretary of defense for policy, during the Clinton Administration, and who is now a security adviser on Bremer's team—told Peter Slevin, of The Washington Post, last November. He said that he had discussed the plan with Wolfowitz at least once and with Feith several times, including the day before the order was given. "The critical point," he told Slevin, "was that nobody argued that we shouldn't do this." No one, that is, the Administration listened to.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (159102)	3/15/2005 8:23:50 AM
From: GST	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<none of whom, as I recall, called it a bad move before Bremer did it> What people saw -- and saw very clearly from day one -- was anarchy in Iraq after the US invasion. It was this environment of total anarchy that set the stage for the miserable cycle of death that has been the hallmark of the US "liberation" of Iraq. The rampaging, the crime, the violence, the looting all took place as US soldiers stood there and watched. Within days the writing was on the wall - the US is incapable of controlling the situation in Iraq. There were three possible routes to avoid this catastrophe: 1) Have enough meaningful numeric support from a global coalition to establish control, or; 2) Invade with an American force three times as large and configured towards policing Iraq, or; 3) Enlist the Iraqi army and police immediately, and pay them immediately. The US did none of the above and turned an illegal invasion into a squalid scene of daily killings and lawlessness, stemmed only by the local Muslim leaders at the very local level and establishing the foundations for the kind of Islamic State they see as their future.