Envoy’s Letters Counter Bush on Plan for Iraq

Now Bush and Bremer are at each others throats, with Bremer releasing letters he sent to Bush warning that he was about to give the order to “dissolve Saddam’s military and intelligence structures,” a plan that the envoy, L. Paul Bremer, said referred to dismantling the Iraqi Army.

Bremer provided the letters to the New York Times on Monday after reading extracts of a new book in which Bush claims that American policy had been “to keep the army intact” but that it “didn’t happen.”

Bremer obviously feels like he is about to be set up as the fall guy for what was official policy and he is clearly not going to sit around quietly whilst they fit this particular albatross around his neck.

The dismantling of the Iraqi Army in the aftermath of the American invasion is now widely regarded as a mistake that stoked rebellion among hundreds of thousands of former Iraqi soldiers and made it more difficult to reduce sectarian bloodshed and attacks by insurgents. In releasing the letters, Mr. Bremer said he wanted to refute the suggestion in Mr. Bush’s comment that Mr. Bremer had acted to disband the army without the knowledge and concurrence of the White House.

“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.

One day later, Mr. Bush wrote back a short thank you letter. “Your leadership is apparent,” the president wrote. “You have quickly made a positive and significant impact. You have my full support and confidence.”

In his recent interview for the book “Dead Certain” by Robert Draper, Bush acted as if he was taken aback when he heard of this decision.

“The policy had been to keep the army intact; didn’t happen,” Mr. Bush told the interviewer. When Mr. Draper asked the president how he had reacted when he learned that the policy was being reversed, Mr. Bush replied, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, “This is the policy, what happened?’ ”

Bremer admits that he has been "smouldering for months" as more and more Bush officials have sought to distance 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.

An anonymous spokesman for Bush has claimed that the President never meant to suggest that he was unaware of the plan, but was merely acknowledging that the original plan had proven unworkable.

Whatever Bush meant with his comments to Draper, it is obvious that Bremer read them differently from how the Bush spokesman implies that Bush meant them. Otherwise he would hardly be releasing these letters that show who knew what and when.

What is clear is that very few officials, even those high in the administration, were aware of this order. Colin Powell has said that he was never made aware of this decision ahead of time and General Pace has said that this decision was made without the input of the joint chiefs of staff.

The few people who were actually inside the loop include Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Feith. Why am I not surprised that, behind every disastrous decision, the same names keep popping up?

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Tags: Bush, Bremer, Iraq war, Iraqi army, disband, Ba'ath party, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith