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Originally Posted by the_13th_redneck More troops to police the streets once the authorities of Iraq under Saddam fell. |
If we hadn't decided to disband the Iraqi Army, we would have had thousands of trained Iraqis to restore the peace. Here is a piece that says it better than I can.
"The decision—decreed by the U.S.-led occupation authority's "Order No. 2," titled "The Dissolution of Entities"—is now widely seen as a turning point in the post-battlefield phase of the war. Removing a potential force for order from an inherently chaotic landscape, the decision allowed looters to flourish and worsened matters by unleashing thousands of ticked-off Iraqi ex-soldiers who no longer had paychecks but still had their guns. The ensuing riots stretched the already-sparse "coalition" forces still thinner. Finally, the elimination of the army destroyed all shreds of the Iraqi people's hopes that their sovereignty might be preserved. Gordon quotes one U.S. colonel as saying of the disbanding, "We changed from being a liberator to an occupier with that single decision."
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I believe it was Paul Bremer who was the father of that stupid idea but approval came from higher.
