I'm with Bremer

Summary: I don't think Bremer's decision to disband the Iraqi army was necessarily a bad one. And the problem in Iraq isn't this issue, the problem is that we didn't go in with enough troops and didn't plan for the occupation.

I have so much I want to write about, I don't quite know where to start. I guess I will begin with something quick. Recently, L. Paul Bremer 3 has been defending his decision to disband the Iraqi army and move forward with de-Baathification. In hindsight, both decisions seem to have been very poor choices. But I don't know if this was obvious as they were being carried out. Before I get into it though, I want to be clear that I think these failed strategies point to the bigger problem that the Bush administration clearly didn't plan for what to do with Iraq after they ousted Saddam.

I have to say, I think it would have been hard to keep the Iraqi army together after our initial run to Baghdad. The army was a symbol of Saddam's brutal oppression, especially to Shiites. And the group whose support we needed from the beginning was the Shiites. They are the majority in the country, and they have reason not to trust us. After the first Gulf War, we encouraged them to rise up, and then refused to intervene when Saddam crushed them. Leaving the army in place would have sent a very bad sign, and might have caused an even stronger Shiite resistance than we see now.

In the end, the reason this failed isn't so much a few policies that didn't work. It failed because we went in without enough troops and without much thought planning about how to handle the country once Saddam was gone. We need to focus on that, and not get lost arguing about some of these smaller issues - especially one like this where neither option is a very good option.