L. Paul Bremer has an op-ed in today's NY Times outlining the bureaucratic process by which the Iraqi Army was disbanded (countering the report in the Draper book on Bush that Bush's policy was to keep the Army going). It's full of clearances, reviews, revisions--makes me nostalgic for the USDA bureaucracy.
The problem is perhaps bifocal--it's easy for the essence of the matter to get lost in the minutia of the process, so Bush's bureaucrats may not have realized what they were doing, and Bush may have been ignorant. On the other hand, you have to pay attention to the details and process. If I understand, a big problem with recalling the army was the process. Everyone had deserted, so there was no skeleton to use to recall the troops, or at least it wasn't readily identifiable to the US (whose intelligence about the state of Iraq was a little short). So, because it would be hard to recall and because the Shia, whom Bush's father had screwed, wanted the disbanding, Bremer went along.
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