Putting the Toothpaste Back in the Tube, Part One In the wake of the fall of the Hussein government in Iraq, the Bush Administration was told by Jay Garner, and many others that disbanding the Iraqi Army structure root and branch was a bad idea. By early May 2003, Garner was replaced with Jerry Bremer. As James Fallows stated in The Atlantic Monthly earlier this year: On May 6 the Administration announced that Bremer would be the new U.S. administrator in Iraq. Two weeks into that job Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army and other parts of the Baathist security structure. If the failure to stop the looting was a major sin of omission, sending the Iraqi soldiers home was, in the view of nearly everyone except those who made the decision, a catastrophic error of commission. ... The case against wholesale dissolution of the army, rather than a selective purge at the top, was that it created an instant enemy class: hundreds of thousands of men who still had their weapons but no longer had a paycheck or a place to go each day. Manpower that could have helped on security patrols became part of the security threat. Studies from the Army War College, the Future of Iraq project, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, to name a few, had all considered exactly this problem and suggested ways of removing the noxious leadership while retaining the ordinary troops. They had all warned strongly against disbanding the Iraqi army. The Army War College, for example, said in its report, "To tear apart the Army in the war's aftermath could lead to the destruction of one of the only forces for unity within the society." "This is not something that was dreamed up by somebody at the last minute," Walter Slocombe—who held Feith's job, undersecretary of defense for policy, during the Clinton Administration, and who is now a security adviser on Bremer's team—told Peter Slevin, of The Washington Post, last November. He said that he had discussed the plan with Wolfowitz at least once and with Feith several times, including the day before the order was given. "The critical point," he told Slevin, "was that nobody argued that we shouldn't do this." No one, that is, the Administration listened to. From today's Washington Post (I'm not cool enough to say WaPo yet like Matthew Yglesias) The United States is moving to rehire former members of Iraq's ruling Baath Party and senior Iraqi military officers fired after the ouster of Saddam Hussein, in an effort to undo the damage of its two most controversial policies in Iraq, according to U.S. officials. The U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, proposed the policy shifts to broaden the strategy to entice the powerful Sunni minority back into the political fold and weaken support for the insurgency in the volatile Sunni Triangle, two of the most persistent challenges for the U.S.-led occupation, the officials say. Both policies are at the heart of national reconciliation, increasingly important as the occupation nears an end. "Iraq has a highly marginalized Sunni minority, and the more that people of standing can be taken off the pariah list, the more that community will become involved politically," said a senior envoy from a country in the U.S.-led coalition. For a prolonged period of time the Bush Administration was warned NOT to do this, to disband the entire governmental structure and army. These actions went substantially beyond, for example, what the United States did in occupying Germany, let alone Japan. But in the Wolfowitzian blue-sky world, doing it the NEW ambitious way is always better than the logical one. OK, that didn't work out to well did it? Nooooooo. So now what are we doing. (1) Bringing back the Army & Government Functionaries AND.....WAIT FOR IT.... (2) Senior Military Officers and Baathist Officials. So, now that the country is truly going to hell...we are bringing back everyone not on a playing card. Brilliant.