Flashback Friday

The decision to disband the Iraqi Army by Paul Bremer is credited with being one of the major blunders of this war, one that made it a very easy decision for well-armed and well-trained former members of the Iraqi Army to become dangerous insurgents. All of this is painfully obvious to us now, so how was a mistake this big made in the first place? This article from January 21, 2003 by Frank Gaffney Jr, is a great illustration of where that faulty mentality came from. Gaffney is the founder and president of the Center for Security Policy, which I'd never heard of, but appears to be a group of book smart nitwits that still think that everything is going fine in Iraq. Unreal. Anyway, here's a portion of Mr. Gaffney's article from 2 years ago today:

An amnesty would also amount to a free-pass for people who must, like Saddam Hussein, be held accountable for war crimes and unimaginable human rights abuses. Without such accountability and a more general program of “lustration” aimed at purging the political system of the ancien regime’s adherents, a post-Saddam Iraq will be denied the chance for real freedom. This chance was fully realized by Germany and Japan, at U.S. insistence, where lustration occurred. It remains, at best, a fragile opportunity for countries of the former Soviet empire where lustration has largely not transpired.

This paragraph demonstrates how people who bought into this poor logic strolled into Baghdad and felt that part of this necessary "lustration" was to tell the Iraqi Army to go home. Unfortunately, this situation was not the same as Germany and Japan. In those cases, the most ardent "adherents" of those regimes had been fighting and dying trying to conquer the world for over 6 years. They'd already been disbanded, and they were already defeated by the time we were rebuilding the country. In Iraq, we happily allowed the "adherents" to become a potent enemy because we couldn't (or wouldn't) see these blatantly obvious differences between the two situations, and never expected the dangerous outcome.

Disbanding the Iraqi Army was a dumb decision. But it was inevitable as long we were willing to believe in dumb comparisons.