Anyone ask L Paul BREMER III why he didn't disarm Iraqi Army?

[Octafish]

I know the Little Turd from Crawford is stupid, but I didn't think Henry Kissinger's gopher was dumb.

George Bush 'not engaged' in crucial decisions

The Telegraph (London)
By Alex Spillius in Washington
Last Updated: 1:19am BST 06/09/2007

The latest book published about George W Bush reveals that the US president was not fully engaged in key policy areas, including the disbandment of the Iraqi army and the build-up to Hurricane Katrina.

Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W Bush, by Robert Draper, highlights both its subject's strong convictions and the poor communication and weak leadership within the administration.

It suggests Mr Bush was unaware the Iraqi army was to be broken up by Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, in May 2003, a decision seen as one of the biggest post-invasion mistakes as it put hundreds of thousands of armed men on the street.

The president told Mr Draper that the policy was to keep the Iraqi army after Saddam's fall. For some reason, it "didn't happen", he said.
advertisement

Mr Bremer responded angrily yesterday to the suggestion that he had taken the decision unilaterally.

He showed the New York Times a letter to the president that said he planned to "dissolve Saddam's military and intelligence structures".

CONTINUED...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/09/05/wbush105.xml

It'd be good to know why, when Bremer disbanded the Iraq Army, he didn't take away their weapons.

[MadMaddie]

1. It didn't matter at the point did it. The munitions and weapon

storage facility that was not guarded when the invasion started had enough weapons to supply Insurgents and militants for a very long time....

[Octafish]

7. There were a lot of explosives 'n' such at Al Qaqaa.

The story then was that the U.S. Army was going so fast, they couldn't spare the personnel to guard it.

TRACKING THE WEAPONS

Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq

New York Times
October 25, 2004
This article was reported and written by James Glanz, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 24 - The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year.

The White House said President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was informed within the past month that the explosives were missing. It is unclear whether President Bush was informed. American officials have never publicly announced the disappearance, but beginning last week they answered questions about it posed by The New York Times and the CBS News program "60 Minutes."

Administration officials said Sunday that the Iraq Survey Group, the C.I.A. task force that searched for unconventional weapons, has been ordered to investigate the disappearance of the explosives.

American weapons experts say their immediate concern is that the explosives could be used in major bombing attacks against American or Iraqi forces: the explosives, mainly HMX and RDX, could produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings.

The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the same type of material, and larger amounts were apparently used in the bombing of a housing complex in November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the blasts in a Moscow apartment complex in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people.

CONTINUED...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/25/international/middleeast/25bomb.html?ex=1256356800&en=3bcf849cf3a68472&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

We see it was another strategic failure on the part of the crazy monkey.

And thus, unfortunately, Al Qaqaa was looted. A

nd now its spoils provide the materiel used to kill Soldiers, Marines and the rest Bush considers cannon fodder.

[Kagemusha]

2. I think the premise of your question is a bit misleading.

These weren't complete military units in the field that were ordered to disband. These were demobilized units that had ceased to exist except on paper and payroll; yeah, there's probably all sorts of sheiks out there with weaponry that used to be part of this division or another but, in the main, we're talking about infantry with infantry weapons.

The US military, which is still a fine force for defeating coherent units in open, flat territory, bombed the living manure out of field units well before Bremer ever arrived in the country.

What Bremer told them was not to leave; what he told them was to not bother to come back. Rifles and pistols were not under central government control however you slice it, and there were no troops to be spared for house to house searches throughout the entire country, to say the least. Or, even for compiling the residences of every individual soldier and searching only those through force of arms.

And don't say, he should have just asked them to hand in everything. I don't need a laugh that badly.

[Kelly Rupert]

5. Thank you

for saving me the keystrokes, and doing so in a more concise fashion than I would have managed.

[Octafish]

8. I questioned why Bremer chose to disband Iraqi Army.

He could have chosen to keep it intact -- even if only on paper.
That way, there would be a semblance of command and control over the men with arms -- the army.
In my post, I asked why Bremer did not.

Here's why I ask: Instead of turning them in, the weapons have been turned on our own troops, the civilian population and the various factions making up the current militias.

Envoy’s Letter Counters Bush on Dismantling of Iraq Army

By Edmund L. Andrews
New York Times

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 — 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.

SNIP...

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.

CONTINUED...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/washington/04bremer.html?ref=middleeast

My point is Bremer said he told the giggling mass-murderer George W Bush he was going to disband the Iraqi Army and Bush said, "OK. So what?"

BTW: Didn't mean to make you laugh. There is nothing funny about this illegal and immoral war.

[Kagemusha]

9. Turning in small arms would be meaningless and irrelevant

And not to mention, good luck getting compliance to begin with. But never mind that. Let's say the men did turn in their small arms. Small arms can be easily replaced in a country truly awash with weapons like Iraq. Iraq is a fluid small arms market. Ordering the army to turn in its weapons, for all the good it would've done, would have accomplished little more than fluctuations in the street price of the average AK-47. In other words, turning in weapons or not turning in weapons was completely meaningless.

Now, cutting off these people's paychecks and livelihoods - THAT had an ENORMOUS effect on the goodwill or lack thereof of the demobilized soldiers. That is where emphasis is properly placed.

As for Bremer, just to repeat others, Bremer has proof he sent letters that Rumsfeld passed on to Bush; there is no corresponding proof that Bush actually read them.

[Yupster]

22. A lot of this doesn't fall to Bremer anyway

Baghdad fell to US troops on April 9, 2003.

Bremer wasn't appointed to his position until May 12.

In that month in between, the Iraqi soldiers had already made their decisions on where they were going. By the time Bremer got there they were long gone.

Now he may have been successful in recalling some of the better units, but blaming him for letting them take their arms when they left isn't fair since they were gone before he got there. Same thing with not guarding ammo dumps.

If you want to blame someone on the ground, it seems like General Garner would be the better villain.

[Imagevision]

3. Now I understand the missing weapons (90 Million $$$) in Iraq came from... it was

6 weeks ago.

[Octafish]

10. It's like BushCo wants to make things worse.

Audit finds many missing U.S. weapons in Iraq

That way, they can make more money. It's the Family Business, Death.

Know your BFEE: Merchants of Death

[lonestarnot]

4. Well a war with weapons is a better war doncha know.

K & R

[Octafish]

12. Will Congress Finally Cut Them Off? Bush Family War Profiteering.

When it comes to trillions in oil, the blood of a million is like a drop in the bucket to such scum.

Will Congress Finally Cut Them Off?

Bush Family War Profiteering

By EVELYN PRINGLE
CounterPunch April 12, 2007

EXCERPT...

According to the January 14, 2007 LA Times, Steven Kosiak, director of budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, says that, starting with the anti-terrorism appropriation a week after the 9/11 attacks, he estimates the US has spent $400 billion fighting terrorism through fiscal 2006, which ended on September 30, 2006.

In January 2007, Marine Corps spokeswoman, Lt Col Roseann Lynch, told Reuters that the war in Iraq is costing about $4.5 billion a month for military "operating costs," which did not include new weapons or equipment.

Since this war on terror was declared following 9/11, the pay levels for the CEOs of the top 34 defense contractors have doubled. The average compensation rose from $3.6 million during the period of 1998-2001, to $7.2 million during the period of 2002-2005, according to an August 2006, report entitled, "Executive Excess 2006," by the Washington-based, Institute for Policy Studies, and the Boston-based, United for a Fair Economy.

This study found that since 9/11, the 34 defense CEOs have pocketed a combined total of $984 million, or enough, the report says, to cover the wages for more than a million Iraqis for a year. In 2005, the average total compensation for the CEOs of large US corporations was only 6% above 2001 figures, while defense CEOs pay was 108% higher.

But the last name of one family, which is literally amassing a fortune over the backs of our dead heroes, matches that of the man holding the purse strings in the White House. On December 11, 2003, the Financial Times reported that three people had told the Times that they had seen letters written by Neil Bush that recommended business ventures in the Middle East, promoted by New Bridges Strategies, a firm set up by President Bush's former campaign manager, who quit his Bush appointed government job as the head of FEMA, three weeks before the war in Iraq began.

Neil Bush was paid an annual fee to "help companies secure contracts in Iraq," the Times said.

But Neil Bush is by no means the only Bush profiting from the war on terror. The first President Bush is so entangled with entities that have profited greatly that it's difficult to even know where to begin. Bush joined the Carlyle Group in 1993, and became a member of the firm's Asian Advisory Board.

CONTINUED...

Thanks for giving a damn, lonestarnot!

[Yupster]

6. You may want to read his book

He goes into quite a bit of detail about the decision.

His basic explanation was that by the time he got there the Iraqi Army had disbanded itself by walking home. The army was mostly Sunni officers and mistreated Shi-ite foot soldiers.

When Iraqi communications broke down early in the war, the Sunni officers left their men. Once the officers left, the men just walked home.

That was his exlanation. I question whether he couldn't have recalled a few of the best units to reform an army around though.

[Kagemusha]

11. So he cut their $ off and antagonized every last one of them.

Everyone reading this post - just consider for a moment what kind of money the US has spent over the last four years, TRYING to stamp out the insurgency, compared to the puny, practically insignificant cost of simply honoring the payrolls of the Iraqi government to its national army, particularly to those mistreated Shiite foot soldiers.

Horrifying, isn't it?

[Octafish]

13. Yep. It would've been a lot cheaper -- in blood and bucks -- to have paid them off.

Either through a paycheck or through out-and-out bribes, we could have bought peace.

But there's more money in war -- and controlling the oil controls the means of making war.

[Disturbed]

14. Busholini was caught in another lie.

Why does this Asshole still have a 29% Approval rating? Shouldn't it be zero?

In the meantime the Dems hand him over everything he demands. Go figure.

[Octafish]

15. Thanks for the heads-up. I blame Bremer's brain-dead boss.

The unelected dry drunk wasn't playing by his lonely dumb self. Cheney had brains enough to know what disbanding the Iraqi Army would lead to.

Today, the army and police are corrupt institutions -- just like the Bush "administration."

When the story first broke, Bremer caused a bit of election-year sweat:

Inner Circle No More?

Paul Bremer’s remarks on Iraq came as an unwelcome surprise to the White House

By Tamara Lipper and Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Updated: 12:23 p.m. ET Oct 14, 2004

Oct. 6 - It wasn’t very long ago that the Bush administration saw L. Paul Bremer III as a true-blue loyalist, a favorite of the president’s who had a good chance at a senior position in a second term, perhaps even as secretary of State. So there was considerable surprise and distress inside the White House this week when Iraq’s former administrator let loose with what he intended to be off-the-record comments criticizing the administration’s handing of Iraq—remarks that were quickly picked up by the Kerry campaign.

Bremer was playing Monday-morning quarterback on Iraq, suggested one White House official. Another described teeth gnashing among Bush aides when the comments became public. Some viewed Bremer as seeking to absolve himself of responsibility for the mistakes made in Iraq, the first official said, many of which could be traced back to decisions made by Bremer himself, particularly the decision to disband the Iraqi Army.

On Tuesday—the same day after Bremer’s critical remarks were made public by The Washington Post—he received no fewer than three calls from top White House officials asking for an explanation, NEWSWEEK has learned. National-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, chief of staff Andrew Card and Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby all spoke to Bremer to make sure his comments were being reported accurately. One Bush official said Libby called from the road because Cheney was about to go into a debate with Democratic nominee John Edwards in Ohio, and it was obvious he would be asked about the Bremer remarks. Rice, he said, called for a similar reason—she was doing television interviews.

According to The Washington Post story Tuesday, Bremer conceded in a speech at an insurance conference in West Virginia that “we never had enough troops on the ground.” He added: “We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness." In another speech in Indiana at DePauw University, Bremer said he frequently raised the issue within the administration and "should have been even more insistent" because the situation in Iraq might be different today, the Post reported. Bremer is currently on a paid-speaking tour of the United States.

In their phone conversations on Tuesday, Bremer explained to Rice, Card and Libby that he was only talking about the situation right after the fall of Baghdad and was not commenting on the current troop levels, sources say. He also expressed regret for the misunderstanding. Rice described her call as amiable, an account backed by Bremer, and a White House official says the tone of the conversations was neither angry nor bitter. In fact, Bush officials have tried to counter the impression of bashing Bremer, saying that any critical comments did not reflect the views of top officials.

Even so, the outing of Bremer’s remarks could not have come at a worse time for the administration. The Post report came just five days after Democratic nominee John Kerry roughed up Bush over Iraq in the campaign’s first debate, and the day of the vice-presidential debate.

CONTINUED...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6194092/site/newsweek/

Thanks for the suggested reading, Yupster. I'm adding the tome to my evidence chronicling the crimes, murders and treason of Bush and his cronies.

[Yupster]

16. With any autobiographical work,

Bremer puts himself of course in the best possible light, but so does everyone.

Still a lot to learn from reading memoirs of people who were in on the history.

I also just finished Tom Delay's. It was a very interesting read, but even in the best light, he doesn't look like a decent human being.

For instance, I didn't know he had a mistress himself during the whole impeachment mess. In his defense, I think it was a requirement of the Republican leadership team though.

[Octafish]

19. Kaplan: Who Disbanded the Iraqi Army? And why was nobody held accountable?

The Fumigator had a kept-woman? That is a most dehumanizing hypocrisy, echoing days of the Antebellum South, aristocratic Europe and the War Pigs of Wall Street. Holding another human subservient for personal pleasure, while lying to one's partner is a perfect analogy for the modern turd's mind-set.

Who Disbanded the Iraqi Army?

And why was nobody held accountable?

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

It's strangely appropriate that, just as the debate gets under way over whether the Iraq war's next phase will be its last, another scuffle has broken out over how the U.S. occupation went so badly from the outset.

The dispute concerns what many regard as the Bush administration's single biggest mistake in the first few months after Saddam Hussein's ouster—the order, in May 2003, to disband the Iraqi army.

It was a move that put 250,000 young Iraqi men out of a job, out on the streets, angry, and armed—and all but guaranteed the violent chaos to come.

In Robert Draper's new book, Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush (which was excerpted in Slate), Bush blamed L. Paul Bremer, who was head of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority during the occupation's first year, for the decision.

"The policy had been to keep the army intact; didn't happen," Bush told Draper. Asked how he had reacted to Bremer's reversal, Bush replied, "Yeah, I can't remember. I'm sure I said, 'This is the policy, what happened?' "

After this exchange was reported in the New York Times, Bremer fought back. He gave the Times two letters from that period: one in which Bremer told Bush what he was doing; and a reply in which Bush patted Bremer on the back for doing a good job. The former envoy also wrote a Times op-ed piece in which he claimed that a) he was only following orders from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; b) top officials and officers in the Pentagon and the White House had approved the move; c) disbanding the Iraqi army was a good idea; and d) there was really no Iraqi army left to disband anyway.

It is a stunning fact that—despite the massive library of in-depth books, tell-all memoirs, and investigative articles about every tactical decision regarding this war—we do not yet know who made this key strategic decision.

Bremer is right about one thing: It wasn't him. Though he wouldn't be so self-demeaning as to admit it, he was a mere errand boy on this point. He arrived in Baghdad on May 14, 2003. The next day, he released CPA Order No. 1, barring members of the Baath Party from all but the lowliest government posts. The next day, he issued CPA Order No. 2, disbanding the Iraqi army.

CONTINUED...

http://www.slate.com/id/2173554/

Bremer's book might be a keeper, too.

[burythehatchet]

17. No need to ask him, I'll tell you precisely why...

The obejctive has always been to destroy Iraq, Iran and Syria. The reason the disbanded troops were allowed to keep their weapons is the same exact reason that the ammo dumps were left unattended. The objective is to create chaos. Because chaos is the ideal situation in which to lie cheat and steal.

[Octafish]

18. TPM: Who Disbanded the Iraqi Army?

BINGO, burythehatchet! Operation CHAOS: More money to be made in wartime -- shortages of oil, overcharges of materiel, profits off new and targeted contracts.

Who Disbanded the Iraqi Army?

09.07.07 -- 11:05PMBy Josh Marshall

Fred Kaplan raises an fascinating point in his new article about the disbanding of the Saddam-era Iraqi Army. We know Paul Bremer didn't come up with the idea. But who did? I'm not sure I realized this. But I guess we actually don't know. And with the near universal belief that it was the biggest blunder of the occupation, it does not seem likely that anyone will be coming forward any time soon.

Since the idea read so much from the pre-war AEI-Iraq Regime Change playbook, I think I'd just been assuming it had come out of the crew around Wolfowitz at the Pentagon. But Kaplan makes an admittedly circumstantial and speculative but in the end I think rather convincing argument that the idea came from Dick Cheney. And Cheney probably got the idea from Ahmed Chalabi -- one of the great charlatans and hucksters in the annals of American foreign policy history.

We're told that it's wrong too dwell too long on what's in the past when it comes to Iraq. And this is good advice in as much as the hard work of figuring out, conceptually and politically, how to end the nightmare in Iraq shouldn't be shunted aside for the comparative ease of cataloguing and knocking out of park all the lame-brained ideas and catastrophic screw ups going back to 2002.

That said, though, there's so much left to talk about. There is such a long list of misdeeds and crimes for which we have neither answers nor accountability. This is just one among many, though it is no doubt one of the most consequential.

CONTINUED...

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/052588.php

Thanks for understanding what it's all about, burythehatchet.

[burythehatchet]

21. It seems to follow a parallel arc with wealth distribution

as wealth concentrates with fewer people the tendency to wall out the unwashed masses becomes very strong. Cheney is the perfect example. He creates chaos on the rest of the planet, makes filthy profits, while burrowing deeper into his fortified bunker. JUST LIKE BIN LADEN!

[Jacobin]

20. I hate this debate. It suggests that if only this military adventurism

and illegal invasion had been pulled off 'correctly', then things would have turned out differently. These are Thomas Friedman talking points and they are beyond ridiculous.

The very idea that Iraqis would have welcomed crusading western infidels to blow up their country and attempt to impose their values on them and steal their oil would be laughable if it weren't so tragic for the 4 million Iraqis forced to flee their country and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, maimed or traumatized by the invasion and occupation.

This reminds me of talk after the fall of Germany by Nazis who decried the leadership failures of Hitler and if only he had not tricked by the D-day landing location, the Third Reich would have been in power for the next thousand years.

:puke:

:puke:

[Octafish]

23. I hate the war. Finding out who's responsible for all its associated crimes helps...

...in delivering Justice.



That is, of course, should Justice return to the United States of America.