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war stories: Military analysis.

Who Disbanded the Iraqi Army?And why was nobody held accountable?

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Friday, Sept. 7, 2007, at 5:08 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

What we do know is that both orders directly violated decisions that had been made at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

On March 10, 2003, a week before the invasion, the National Security Council held a principals' meeting, attended by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet, the Joints Chiefs of Staff, and the top aides to all these officials. They decided that after the war, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission would be set up—similar to such panels in post-apartheid South Africa and post-Communist Eastern Europe—to ferret out the undesirable Baathists from those who could reliably work for a post-Saddam regime. Most Baathists were ordinary, even apolitical, people whose jobs required them to join the party. A rough calculation by NSC staffers and intelligence analysts was that only about 5 percent of the party—the leaders—would have to be removed, and even they would have the right to appeal.

On March 12, at another principals' meeting, on what to do about the Iraqi military, these same top U.S. officials decided to disband the Republican Guard—Saddam's elite corps and bodyguards—but to call the regular army's soldiers back to duty and to reconstitute their units after a proper vetting of their loyalties.

Both of these decisions were unanimous. NSC staff members had briefed officials on these plans before the meetings, up and down the chain of command, and they encountered no substantive dissent.

Most of these officials learned about Bremer's orders the way that most citizens did—by reading about them in the newspaper. Colin Powell, then secretary of state, called Gen. Peter Pace, then vice chairman of the JCS, and asked if he had known about the order. Pace replied that he hadn't and that none of the chiefs had been consulted.

In Baghdad, a U.S. Army colonel named Paul Hughes had spent weeks contacting officers of the Iraqi regular army, paying them to call up their troops to rejoin the new government—just as the NSC had directed. He was flabbergasted when Bremer's orders came down. (Hughes' travails are well documented in George Packer's book The Assassins' Gate and in the documentary film No End in Sight. In the movie, Hughes convincingly demolishes Bremer's claim that there was no Iraqi army left to reconstitute.)

When Saddam's regime collapsed, Iraq's security system collapsed as well. Rumsfeld had failed to draw up a postwar "stabilization" plan; he deliberately sent too few troops for such a mission, in any case. There was no Iraqi army or police force to keep order. And so there was disorder and the horrors that followed.

Perhaps the most galling part of this sad saga is that nobody was held accountable for this extraordinary act of insubordination.

Many stories have since been told about the dysfunctional nature of the Bush administration—the many instances when a decision would be made, in some cases by the president himself, only to be reversed or simply ignored by (most often) Rumsfeld and/or Cheney. But this story had, very possibly, the most destructive consequences.

Did Bush realize the magnitude of the act? Did he so much as read the letter that Bremer later sent to the Times? Did he order an investigation into how this order could have been promulgated? Finally, did he care?

Bush's casual reply to Robert Draper's question about Bremer's orders—"Yeah, I can't remember"—suggests that the answer to all these questions is, pathetically, tragically, "No."

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and author of the forthcoming book, "Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power." He can be reached at .

Photograph of Paul Bremer by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.

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Remarks from the Fray:

Fred Kaplan's post here is very odd. How can he write an entire piece on the disbanding of the Iraqi army and not even mention Walter Slocombe? Slocombe is the highly respected former Pentagon official (under Clinton, interestingly), who served as national security adviser to the CPA in 2003 and who acknowledges that the disbanding of the Iraqi army was largely his idea. Bremer's piece in the NYTimes talks about Slocombe's role in detail. When discussing the matter himself, Slocombe never disguises his role - and I don't believe he ever mentions Chalabi as contributing to the decision. Sure, Slocombe didn't have the power to sign the order, or to direct Bremer to do what he did, but for Kaplan to ignore his acknowledged central just seems peculiar.

Kaplan says, "we do not yet know who made this key strategic decision." But Slocombe claims he came up with the idea. Maybe Kaplan doesn't think Slocombe was as big a player in the matter as Bremer and Slocombe claim. But if so, he's got to explain why, since Slocombe is so closely associated with the disbanding decision. Simply ignoring Slocombe's role is a real weakness in Kaplan's post here.

--rriley

(To reply, click here.)

The author's statement about the source of the order to disband the Iraqi Army being the vice president since no one else has talked about it is begging the question. We cannot legally blame the vice president because he does not have the authority to give any order. The Constitution only grants the vice president the authority to preside over the Senate and cast a vote. The president may appoint advisers and counselors and presumably the vice president can also serve as an adviser or counselor. I don't believe the advisers have real authority either and thus cannot give orders.

If the vice president gave the order we have no one to blame but ourselves. No one tried to stop the vice president from exercising power he didn't possess. I don't recall hearing about any politicians trying to curtail the vice president.

If he had any informal authority it came from the president. This of course makes his statement that he is not part of the Executive Branch all the more ludicrous. If as President Pro Tem of the Senate he is part of the Legislative Branch (this was his claim as I recall) he che doesn't have any authority either--senators can't issue orders.

--sideriosis

(To reply, click here.)

While maintaining the Old Iraqi Army might have prevented some Sunni insurgents by keeping them in uniform, I think we would have had an even greater problem had we tried to sustain it.

It was the power most closely associated with Sunni dominance, and I think it is likely that we would have had a larger Shia problem, sooner, had we tried to keep it intact. I don't think Sistani would have found that acceptable. Sistani is still the best friend we have here by not demanding a Shiite only government, and allowing the attempt at a national coalition government. He may not like us, but he could make this a very different, much more difficult and bloody war.

If there was a policy decision regarding the Old Iraqi Army that set us up for the insurgency, it was not destroying the Old Iraqi military in detail, leaving hundreds of thousands of young men available for the insurgency. We bypassed whole units rather than destroy them. If you compare to successful occupations by the US, one of the differences is a lack of surviving military age men at the beginning of the occupation. We like to think we are in a new stage of warfare, but when it comes to "boots on the ground" occupation, I think some old rules still apply, and one is you have to defeat a population before you occupy them.

So from a policy perspective and assuming we wanted to do what is best for Iraq in the long run, would it have been better to eliminate their fighters before occupying, but also eliminate the same population that provide manpower and work, or is it better to have an insurgency for a few years that leaves a larger post war work force? We know the damage caused by the second choice, but I don't know that we have a picture of what Iraq would have been like with the first.

Gratuitously continuing to fight against an army that has no real ability to defend itself is not a pleasant thought, but all it would have really required was to slow the invasion down, eradicate units we bypassed, and let the Iraqi's grind themselves down against the invading divisions...but at a greater cost in US lives at the beginning of the war, rather than losing them now...and since we can't be certain of the future, the choice to reduce US casualties early at the risk of some future threat is pretty forgivable.

I don't think we had good choices. One might have been "militarily sound" but politically disastrous causing a different insurgency, the other a humanitarian nightmare but probably the only effective way to tamp down a pending insurgency.

--clown_nose

(To reply, click here.)

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