Paul Bremer Produces Letter Countering Bush's Claim About Dissolving Iraqi Army

From Robert Draper's book, Dead Certain,:

Mr. Bush acknowledged one major failing of the early occupation of Iraq when he said of disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era military, “The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen.”

But when Mr. Draper pointed out that Mr. Bush’s former Iraq administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army’s dissolution and then asked Mr. Bush how he reacted to that, Mr. Bush said, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?’ ” But, he added, “Again, Hadley’s got notes on all of this stuff,” referring to Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser.

Today's NY Times reports:

A previously undisclosed exchange of letters shows that President Bush was told in advance by his top Iraq envoy in May 2003 of a plan to “dissolve Saddam’s military and intelligence structures,” a plan that the envoy, L. Paul Bremer, said referred to dismantling the Iraqi Army.

Mr. Bremer provided the letters to The New York Times on Monday after reading that Mr. Bush was quoted in a new book as saying that American policy had been “to keep the army intact” but that it “didn’t happen.”

The dismantling of the Iraqi Army in the aftermath of the American invasion is now widely regarded as a mistake that stoked rebellion among hundreds of thousands of former Iraqi soldiers and made it more difficult to reduce sectarian bloodshed and attacks by insurgents. In releasing the letters, Mr. Bremer said he wanted to refute the suggestion in Mr. Bush’s comment that Mr. Bremer had acted to disband the army without the knowledge and concurrence of the White House.

“We must make it clear to everyone that we mean business: that Saddam and the Baathists are finished,” Mr. Bremer wrote in a letter that was drafted on May 20, 2003, and sent to the president on May 22 through Donald H. Rumsfeld, then secretary of defense.

After recounting American efforts to remove members of the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein from civilian agencies, Mr. Bremer told Mr. Bush that he would “parallel this step with an even more robust measure” to dismantle the Iraq military.

One day later, Mr. Bush wrote back a short thank you letter. “Your leadership is apparent,” the president wrote. “You have quickly made a positive and significant impact. You have my full support and confidence.”

On the same day, Mr. Bremer, in Baghdad, had issued the order disbanding the Iraqi military. Mr. Bush did not mention the order to abolish the military, and the letters do not show that he approved the order or even knew much about it. Mr. Bremer referred only fleetingly to his plan midway through his three-page letter and offered no details.

In an interview with Robert Draper, author of the new book, “Dead Certain,” Mr. Bush sounded as if he had been taken aback by the decision, or at least by the need to abandon the original plan to keep the army together.

“The policy had been to keep the army intact; didn’t happen,” Mr. Bush told the interviewer. When Mr. Draper asked the president how he had reacted when he learned that the policy was being reversed, Mr. Bush replied, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, “This is the policy, what happened?’ ”

Mr. Bremer indicated that he had been smoldering for months as other administration officials had distanced themselves from his order. “This didn’t just pop out of my head,” he said in a telephone interview on Monday, adding that he had sent a draft of the order to top Pentagon officials and discussed it “several times” with Mr. Rumsfeld.

A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the White House is not commenting on Mr. Draper’s book, said Mr. Bush indeed understood the order and was acknowledging in the interview with Mr. Draper that the original plan had proved unworkable.

“The plan was to keep the Iraqi Army intact, and that’s accurate,” the official said. “But by the time Jerry Bremer announced the order, it was fairly clear that the Iraqi Army could not be reconstituted, and the president understood that. He was acknowledging that that was something that did not go as planned.”

But the letters, combined with Mr. Bush’s comments, suggest confusion within the administration about what quickly proved to be a decision with explosive repercussions.

Indeed, Mr. Bremer’s letter to Mr. Bush is striking in its almost nonchalant reference to a major decision that a number of American military officials in Iraq strongly opposed. Some senior administration officials, including the secretary of state at the time, Colin L. Powell, have reportedly said subsequently that they did not know about the decision ahead of time.

Gen. Peter Pace, then the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations in February 2004 that the decision to disband the Iraqi Army was made without the input of the joint chiefs. “We were not asked for a recommendation or for advice,” he said.

The reference from Mr. Bremer’s note to Mr. Bush is limited to one sentence at the end of a lengthy paragraph in a three-page letter. The letter devoted much more space to recounting what Mr. Bremer described as “an almost universal expression of thanks” from the Iraqi people “to the U.S. and to you in particular for freeing Iraq from Saddam’s tyranny.” It went on to recall how Mr. Bremer had been kissed by an old Iraqi man who was under the impression that Mr. Bremer was Mr. Bush. In his 2006 memoir, Mr. Bremer said he had briefed senior officials in Washington on the plan, but he did not mention the exchange of letters with Mr. Bush.

On Monday, Mr. Bremer made it clear that he was unhappy about being portrayed as a renegade of sorts by a variety of former administration officials.

Mr. Bremer said he sent a draft of the proposed order on May 9, shortly before he departed for his new post in Baghdad, to Mr. Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon officials.

Among others who received the draft order, he said, were Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense; Douglas J. Feith, then under secretary of defense for policy; Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, then head of the American-led coalition forces in Iraq; and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Mr. Bremer said that he had briefed Mr. Rumsfeld on the plan “several times,” and that his top security adviser in Baghdad, Walter B. Slocombe, had discussed it in detail with senior Pentagon officials as well as with senior British military officials. He said he received detailed comments back from the joint chiefs, leaving no doubt in his mind that they understood the plan.

“I might add that it was not a controversial decision,” Mr. Bremer said. “The Iraqi Army had disappeared and the only question was whether you were going to recall the army. Recalling the army would have had very practical difficulties, and it would have political consequences. The army had been the main instrument of repression under Saddam Hussein. I would go on to argue that it was the right decision. I’m not second-guessing it.”

General McKiernan reportedly felt unhappy with Mr. Bremer’s plan to slowly build a new Iraqi Army from scratch, as were other American officers. In his farewell meeting with Mr. Bremer in June 2003, he urged him to “go bigger and faster” in fielding a new military.

Republicans Conflicted, Moving Toward Benchmarks

The LATimes reports that Republicans say a new spending bill should include benchmarks for the Iraqi government to meet:

Distressed by the violence in Iraq and worried about tying their political fate to an unpopular president, some Republicans on Capitol Hill are beginning to move away from the White House to stake out a more critical position on the U.S. role in the war.

These lawmakers are advocating proposals that would tie the U.S. commitment in the war to the Iraqi government's ability to demonstrate that it is working to quell the sectarian conflict.

One of my favorite comments comes from Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine):

"Obviously, the president would prefer a straight funding bill with no benchmarks, no conditions, no reports. Many of us, on both sides of the aisle, don't see that as viable."

The fact is that even when conditions have been put into legislation, Republicans have ignored them, and enabled Bush make Iraq into a hell on earth.

From AUMF or HJ resolution 114 (the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq that Congress gave Bush on October 16, 2002):

SEC. 4. REPORTS TO CONGRESS.
(a) REPORTS.—The President shall, at least once every 60 days,
submit to the Congress a report on matters relevant to this joint
resolution, including actions taken pursuant to the exercise of
authority granted in section 3 and the status of planning for efforts
that are expected to be required after such actions are completed,
including those actions described in section 7 of the Iraq Liberation
Act of 1998 (Public Law 105–338).

^{You can read the rest (AUMF) here to learn what else was required of Bush that he has never complied with.}

The Republican-controlled Congress let it slide. There have been none of these required reports to Congress in the more than 4 years of this war in Iraq.

If you've read any of the books that have detailed what's been going on in the Bush administration and how it's conducted the war, I think you'd notice exactly what the problem is. Aside, of course, from the fact that the war never should have happened in the first place, or that neocons like Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Stephen Hadley had an impossible ideological dream of Iraq as their incubator for conservatives' economic theories (privatization). What is the problem?

It's that everyone in the Bush administration is a dilettante. They're all big on theory, but they haven't any practical experience actually working.

It's a pattern that's evident from all of the accounts of this administration. You can even pick it up in the 9/11 Commission's Report. The ordinary people doing the work in government, career workers, civil servants (and in Iraq, the troops), all did (and are doing) their jobs superbly. It's that middle level, the appointees, the political players right up through Bush, that have failed miserably.

Some of the books published so far make for extremely frustrating reading for people trained and experienced in breaking down tasks and communications to their most basic, direct and efficient steps. I don't think that the authors themselves realize that what they have revealed in their books, of the failures of the Bush administration, all have this common thread.

Bob Woodward goes into some detail in "State of Denial" about some of the efforts undertaken to identify why the invasion of Iraq wasn't going as had been sold to Congress and the American people. Woodward describes Condoleeza Rice at loggerheads with Rumsfeld. In March, 2004, Rice sends her senior director for defense at the NSC, Frank Miller, to Iraq to find out what's really going on. Miller headed the Executive Steering Group which was to coordinate Iraq issues among the different federal agencies.

On one trip, Miller spent a week traveling all over Iraq and seemed to get a sense of the problem: "Bremer didn't delegate and he doesn't have time to do everything."

Though Bremer tried to control things, on so many issues, Miller said, the staff at CPA was playing to run out of the clock. They kept deferring to the iraqi Governing Council, which was slow or stagnant in making decisions-communications, regulatory policy, police code of conduct, hiring former officers, firing the Kirkuk teachers. It was always the same story. People in the CPA are tired, bitter and defeatist. There are few problem-solvers there, and the Iraqi ministries aren't much help.

"We need to pick our top 10 issues," he advised, things that needed to be accomplished before the handover of sovereignty was schedule to take place.

Miller listed the top 10 issues, and included five more - all general complaints, with no concrete recommendations:

First they shouldn't underestimate how many Iraqis were watching Al Jazeera on satellite TV. Electricity is a problem, he added, not just because they didn't have enough of it, but because to Iraqis it was seen as something that should be free.

Second, Sanchez and Bremer aren't talking. And Sanchez and his division commanders aren't communicating effectively enough.

Third, CPA never leaves the Green Zone. Their regional offices in all 18 provinces outside Baghdad are worth their weight in gold, but the folks in the green Zone were not doing anything

Fourth, de-Baathification is a mess. There are some good people with only tenuous Baathist connections who are not being allowed in, Miller said. He wasn't sure whether it was the CPA or the de-Baathification group run by the nephew of Ahmed Chalabi who was responsible, but Chalabi was hoarding files from the old iraqi intelligence service-a prime source of information on who had been a true-believer Baathist under Saddam-making it almost impossible to determine levels of involvement.

Fifth, they needed to put contracts on a wartime footing. CPA was sending out requests for proposals with 90-day timelines. That was pointless, bureaucratic busywork. In 90 days, CPA would be nearly extinct.

On page 294, Woodward writes:

Miller repeated his briefing to most of the deputies on the NSC, including Armitage and Pace. He talked with Scooter Libby, hoping his most salient points would make their way to the vice president.

At the Pentagon briefing for Wolfowitz, it was standing room only, with lots of straphangers from Feith's policy shop and the CPA-Washington liaison. There's not a single person in this room who will do a thing about what I have to say, Miller thought, even if they believe it. The problem as always was implementation.

He started putting these items on the deputies committee agendas. How do we cut contracting time? How do we get more CERP funds for military commanders? Can't we standardize the training for the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps? How do we weed out the bad apples so we have a better, saner, quicker de-Baathification process?

"I will fix it," Rice told Miller. She called Bremer. "You will give the division commanders more money." The division commanders got another billion dollars in CERP funds.

This story continues with success in Iraq being no closer, actually getting worse, and repeats itself just about every six months to a year. Rice sends Miller to find out "What's really going on in Iraq?", Miller returns, reports, more money is sent, lather, rinse, repeat. Reading this, I became increasingly annoyed that at no point did anybody with authority actually hand-carry the money through, find out just what and where the bottlenecks are, and make on-the-spot decisions to break through them. There are no Lt. General Russel Honores involved anywhere in this quagmire of Iraq.

And after four years of it, I believe that it's by design.