quote: Before the war, President Bush approved a plan that would have put several hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers on the U.S. payroll and kept them available to provide security, repair roads and prepare for unforeseen postwar tasks. But that project was stopped abruptly in late May by L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, who ordered the demobilization of Iraq's entire army, including largely apolitical conscripts.
Bremer reversed himself a month later, but by then the occupation had lost not merely time and momentum but also credibility among former soldiers and their families, an important segment of Iraq's population.
quote:As Garner was developing the policy amid the unexpected lawlessness in Baghdad, the White House replaced him with Bremer, a terrorism specialist with high-level State Department experience. He arrived May 12 with a mandate from Bush to take firm control of the U.S. occupation.
By that time, the prewar intelligence had proved inaccurate. No Iraqi units changed sides, and the number of surrendering forces was small. Iraqis had sacked Army garrisons, and entire divisions had melted away.
Bremer soon declared in internal meetings that no Iraqi units would be reconstituted and that soldiers would not be paid. On May 23, he issued a formal order that dismissed the army and canceled pensions. The order covered many categories of Iraqis, among them war widows and disabled veterans who were senior party members, defined as any officers at the rank of colonel or above.
U.S. officials in Baghdad, including Garner and Bates, were startled.
"It came with formidable force and decisiveness, as the president's policy. Nobody was supposed to challenge it and that was that," said one U.S. official in Baghdad at the time. Another said: "There was never a discussion that I was involved in where we would disband the military. It caught me completely by surprise."
The second official, recalling violent crime in the Iraqi capital, said Iraqi commanders had offered to gather soldiers, who would be paid for their work. The Americans could easily have pulled together "a couple of thousand military police in the Baghdad region," he said. "Many of the soldiers had taken their weapons home. Some had armored vehicles."
The demobilization decision appears to have originated largely with Walter B. Slocombe, a former undersecretary of defense appointed to oversee Iraqi security forces. He believed strongly in the need to disband the army and felt that vanquished soldiers should not expect to be paid a continuing salary. He said he developed the policy in discussions with Bremer, Feith and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz.
"This is not something that was dreamed up by somebody at the last minute and done at the insistence of the people in Baghdad. It was discussed," Slocombe said. "The critical point was that nobody argued that we shouldn't do this."
Slocombe recalled discussing the issue with Wolfowitz on May 8 and with Feith several times, including on May 22, the night before Bremer issued the formal order. Trying to put the army back together at that point, he said, "would've been a practical disaster."
For a minute there, I thought you were suggesting the Paul Bremer instituted his own plan against that of the President and the Defense Department. Were that the case, I'd be amazed that he kept his job.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
