One rarely hears Bremer's reasoning for "dissolving the army".

[link|http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/bremer200601100900.asp|NRO]:

Lopez: What's the biggest myth about your time in Iraq you want to set people straight about in this book?

Bremer: I suppose the myth that we made a mistake \ufffddisbanding\ufffd the Iraqi army. The facts are these: There was not a single Iraqi army unit intact in the country at Liberation. There was no army to \ufffddisband.\ufffd It had \ufffdself-demobilized,\ufffd in the Pentagon\ufffds phrase. Hundreds of thousand of Shia draftees, seeing which way the war was going, had simply gone home. They were not going to come back into a hated army.

The army and intelligence services had been vital instruments of Saddam\ufffds brutal regime. He had used the army in a years\ufffd long campaign against the Kurds, killing tens of thousands of them, culminating in the use of chemical weapons against men, women, and children in 1988. The army had brutally suppressed the Shia uprising after the first Gulf war, machine gunning tens of thousands of Shia civilians into mass graves in the south. Together these two groups make up about 80 percent of the population.

So recalling the Iraqi army (which would have meant sending American soldiers into Shia homes, farms, and villages and forcing them back into the army under their Sunni officers) would have had dire political consequences. The Kurds told me clearly that they would not have accepted it, and would have seceded from Iraq. Such a move would probably have ended Shia cooperation with the Coalition and perhaps even led to a Shia uprising, initially against such an Iraqi army, and eventually against the Coalition.

But we knew we had to find a place in Iraqi society for the former army men. So we welcomed them back into the new army, including officers up to the level of colonel. And we started paying the other officers a monthly stipend, which continued right to the end of the occupation.

Bremer's Order 2 which disbanded the Iraqi military is [link|http://www.iraqcoalition.org/regulations/20030823_CPAORD_2_Dissolution_of_Entities_with_Annex_A.pdf|here] (5 page .pdf). It also disbanded many other organizations under Saddam's control and mentions that a New Iraqi Corps will be constructed.

Not being there, I don't know whether Bremer's take is correct or not. Perhaps he did have no choice, under the circumstances. I think he makes a reasonable case. But he doesn't address the question of what he expected would happen with the Army leadership - he didn't really expect them to just sit on their hands at home, did he? (In Order 2 he mentions that colonels and above can appeal their ban to him, but one would imagine that he wouldn't have the time or inclination to sort through hundereds of cases like that.)

It does bother me when things get to become received wisdom without a reasonable debate on both sides. This is one of the failings of this administration, IMHO - they too often refuse to debate the reasons for their policy choices or to discuss the results. "You're either with us or your with the terrorists" isn't much of a way to spread understanding.

I suppose if I had had a free hand, I would have tried to encourage conscripts to return to their units, and I would have had a crash program to weed-out unrepentant Baathists from the leadership, but would have kept those who swore allegiance to the new regime. But even then, it would have been a very difficult task (because the Shia grunts would have a long memory and probably wouldn't want to stay under Sunni leadership).

FWIW.

Cheers,
Scott.

[link|http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/11/AR2007051102054_pf.html|Washington Post]:

Sunday, May 13, 2007; B01

Once conventional wisdom congeals, even facts can't shake it loose. These days, everyone "knows" that the Coalition Provisional Authority made two disastrous decisions at the beginning of the U.S. occupation of Iraq: to vengefully drive members of the Baath Party from public life and to recklessly disband the Iraqi army. The most recent example is former CIA chief George J. Tenet, whose new memoir pillories me for those decisions (even though I don't recall his ever objecting to either call during our numerous conversations in my 14 months leading the CPA). Similar charges are unquestioningly repeated in books and articles. Looking for a neat, simple explanation for our current problems in Iraq, pundits argue that these two steps alienated the formerly ruling Sunnis, created a pool of angry rebels-in-waiting and sparked the insurgency that's raging today. The conventional wisdom is as firm here as it gets. It's also dead wrong.

[...]

He's still fighting an up-hill battle here. While he may be right, the fact that the country dissolved into chaos on his (or his and Garner's) watch and about the only good one can say is that Turkey didn't invade.

I do hope that when the definitive histories of this war are written, that people don't take the simplistic view that the important mistakes were Bremer's (and Garner's). They were given an impossible task.

Cheers,
Scott.