It Doesn't Matter--Paul Bremer is Still an Ass

Paul Bremer, the first US Proconsul in Baghdad, is in a snit. To err on the side of accuracy, the one time panjandrum of rebuilding Iraq following our invasion is throwing a hissy-fit.

The cause of Bremer's tantrum is the offhand statement to an interviewer's question by the Commander Guy hisself. Bush allowed that Bremer fired the entire Iraqi military unilaterally.

Of course, this was an all-too-typical case of Bush's inability to wrap his brain around his tongue. Everyone who was aware of what was happening in Washington and Baghdad in those heady days of false victory knows diddly well that nothing significant was done in Iraq without clearance all the way up the chains of command.

Note the plural ending, chains of command. One of the major initial problems in Iraq was the existence of two parallel chains of command, one military and one civilian. This was a stupid and unnecessary complication.

For Bremer, it was an irritant. He wanted full-span control of all he surveyed. Sharing it with the military was not in his game plan. Even more annoying was the reality that his immediate predecessor, who was replaced with graceless rapidity, not only was a retired military chap but also favored keeping the Iraqi army intact albeit cleansed of Saddamist loyalists.

Keeping the army intact was both logical and self-evident. Soldiers, in common with the members of the civil service (which was also fired by Viceroy Bremer), wanted to keep their jobs, keep a paycheck coming, take care of their families.

Wow! Is that a surprise or what?

Since the US controlled the money flow, keeping the army on the job was the best way of assuring a useful degree of loyalty. At the very least, keeping the soldiers at work would limit the number of politically disaffiliated individuals who knew how to use weapons, make bombs, and, if provoked, raise all kinds of hell.

The Geek has heard various accounts of who and when the army disbandment policy emerged. Some have fingered Bremer as the Deep Thinking Big Brain behind it. Others have disagreed with that, at least in part.

Many stories, most of which the Geek finds credible, suggest Bremer in a supporting role, with major responsibility resting on the same rabid neo-con ninnies in the Pentagon that planned the invasion. That would be Doug Feith, Paul Wolfewitz in the role of Chief Lackey, Don Rumsfield playing Darth Vader, Dick Cheney as the Black Eminence and W. Bush, the Commander Guy, doing his usual thing--signing whatever Cheney wanted him to.

As the letters Bremer pulled out of his files to share with the mainstream media make clear, the Commander Guy did sign off on the idiotic notion of firing the army. It's irrelevant.

Whether Bremer acted without authority (a proposition the Geek finds preposterous on the face of it) or developed an idea which was fully embraced by the brain dead ideologues of the Pentagon and White House is unimportant. It's a mere symptom. Not the disease.

The disease is a combination of unmitigated arrogance, ideologically driven stupidity, and intellectual/moral cowardliness. As the Geek has argued before, the invasion was based on false premises. It was targeted against a threat which never existed save in the imaginations of neo-cons determined to force the Iraqis "to elect good men."

While some in the State Department obviously thought about the day after victory, those plans, whatever they might have contained in detail, came to nothing against the opposition of Cheney and his fellow neo-con zombies.

Firing the Iraqi army will go down as a self-defeating notion that is difficult to match in recent history. Offhand, the Geek can come up with only one which ranks in the same league with it.

Way back in the closing days of the Eisenhower Administration, our man in Saigon, Ngo Dinh Diem, in response to US pressure inaugurated a program of "land reform." The particular wrinkle he introduced to what otherwise was a good idea in the rarefied air of theory was providing land to fellow Catholic refugees from North Vietnam.

OK, so far. But there's more to the story.

The land Diem gave away was high quality farmland. It was already occupied. That was fine with Diem. He had the former occupants relocated at gunpoint to inferior crowded areas.

The displaced farmers were righteously annoyed. They showed it. They became Viet Cong.

The enemy.

So did much of the forcibly unemployed Iraqi army.

It's a small step from soldier to insurgent. They're in the same business. Just competitors.