One of the holiday weekend’s more notable revelations came by way of Robert Draper’s new book, “Dead Certain,” which is based on multiple conversations with the president and his team. Specifically, Draper spoke to Bush about the disastrous 2003 decision to disband the Iraqi Army, generally considered one of the administration’s more catastrophic errors.
Bush said, “The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen.” Draper noted that the president’s man in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, forced the army’s dissolution. Asked how he responded to the decision, Bush said, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?'”
It’s a rather humiliating revelation. Bush comes across like a confused child — he didn’t understand the decision, he’s not sure how the decision was made, and asked for his reaction to the decision, Bush is left to conclude, “Yeah, I can’t remember.”
In effect, Bush is saying Bremer ignored administration policy and acted on his own. That seems rather hard to believe — why wasn’t Bremer replaced if that were true? — but it seems Bremer doesn’t want to be the fall-guy here. Yesterday, he gave the NYT a copy of a letter from 2003 in which he communicated with Bush directly about disbanding the Iraqi Army.
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. […]
“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.
After recounting American efforts to remove members of the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein from civilian agencies, Mr. Bremer told Mr. Bush that he would “parallel this step with an even more robust measure” to dismantle the Iraq military.
Bush received and responded to the letter, telling Bremer, “Your leadership is apparent.”
The exchange tells us a few things of interest.
First, if Bush was keeping up with Iraq policy and read Bremer’s letter, he was lying about his role in the mistake that helped create the Iraqi insurgency.
Second, if Bush never read Bremer’s note and was detached from policy decisions, major consequential transformations were underway in Iraq while the president had no idea what was going on, even when given information in print by his own administrator on the ground.
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.
To be sure, this is hardly the first time the Bush gang can’t keep their stories straight about one of their colossal failures, but it’s another handy one for the list. It’s also a reminder in the midst of the current debate over the future of U.S. policy in Iraq — one side of the argument has no credibility.
Only 503 days to go.