Quote Originally Posted by Lemur
Pannonian, you're about half-right on several fronts. Neither Bremer nor Garner could have done much of anything about looting -- civilian staffers sent the military lists of sites that should be protected. Nobody on the military side of things could ever say what heppened to those lists. And you can't blame it on not enough troops -- there were whoe companies without orders once Baghdad fell.

The ultimate truth is that there was contradictory planning, and none of it was firmed up at the executive level. The chaos on the streets goes right back to Rumsfeld and the Executive.

You also can't single-handedly blame Bremer for the psychic devastation of the Iraqi people. 35 years of a police state did more to kill initiative and punish the worthy than a couple of years' worth of bad decisions coming from the C.P.A.

The one thing you can fairly, squarely blame Bremer for is the demobilization of the Iraqi army. That was his call, and nobody upstairs contradicted him. We made hundreds of thousands of enemies we really, really didn't need when he gave that order.
It's not just the demobilisation of the Iraqi army. It's also the removal of the entire civil service that ran the country, removal of all restrictions and rules governing the economy, removal of all the social sinews that held the country together. It's like a rerun of the arguments put forward by the Whigs in the 18th century, except they never dared implement those ideas in their totality in Britain, and they didn't have the muscle to implement them abroad.

It's ironic that many conservatives support the Iraq venture because it was done by a nominally conservative party, when the ideas involved are hyper-liberalist. Freedom from restrictions, belief in the idea of progress, export of these ideals - classic liberalism.