akirlu | Another Bush Screw-up Made Explicit (Reply)

As you know, Bob, one of the bigger dumb mistakes we made in Iraq was disbanding Saddam Hussein's existing Iraqi army. In one blow, we massively upped the rolls of unemployed, disgruntled, armed anti-American Iraqis, and left Iraq without a military force of its own to wield whenever it became sovereign (as opposed to "sovereign") again, thus forcing US troops to bear an even larger portion of the burden of Iraq's security and pacification. Despite the claims of the Bush administration, we've actually made very little concrete progress in replacing those troops with a new, retrained, reconstituted force. Meanwhile, there's every reason to suppose that the ranks of the various insurgencies are filled with former Iraqi military. Basically, disbanding the Iraqi army was one of our great moments in snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory. Now, via Through the Looking Glass we find that the original author of that particular bonehead move was: George W. Bush, himself. Go click through the link. I particularly like the part where Jay Garner is arguing that there are way more cons than pros in doing such a thing, and Bremer stops him and says it doesn't matter, he has to do it no matter what, because the Preznit told him to.

So, further confirmation of what we already knew: W. is completely incompetent to run a war, and Paul Bremer was sent in to be Georgie's Bitch in Iraq. Pity Bremer didn't grow a set of testicles 'til just this week, and then, only temporarily.