"Success" in Iraq: de-de-Baathification

The Iraqi Parliament has finally done something that the Bush administration, and many others, considered essential to political progress in Iraq: it passed a law intended to open government jobs to former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party. What should have been heralded as an accomplishment, however, may only serve to further reinforce the bumbling nature of President Bush’s ill-conceived adventure in Iraq.

Let's remember that the only reason the Iraqis have to pass an anti-anti-Baathification law in the first place is to undo the anti-Baathification law originally passed by Paul Bremer with the blessing of the Bush administration.

In an act that many saw as the original sin that led to Iraq's current turmoil, Bremer crippled Iraq's institutions of governance and security and created half a million angry and jobless people in the process. He has since said that there were legitimate grievances about the order but that it was necessary to bring oppressed Shiite Muslims and ethnic Kurds into the government.

Bremer's order affected 400,000 members of the armed forces and all civil servants and officials above the Baath Party's lowest rank-and-file level, a number estimated at 32,000 to 85,000.

Bremer now blames the Iraqis for screwing up his brilliant plan.

We then turned over the implementation of this carefully focused policy to Iraq's politicians. I was wrong here. The Iraqi leaders, many of them resentful of the old Sunni regime, broadened the decree's impact far beyond our original design. That led to such unintended results as the firing of several thousand teachers for being Baath Party members. We eventually fixed those excesses, but I should have made implementation the job of a judicial body, not a political one.

George Bush: preparing for World War III

Sometimes you have to ask yourself, would you rather have a complete incompetent or a baldfaced liar as your president?

(Of course, there's no rule that says you can't have both)

BUSH: I was made aware of the NIE last week. In August, I think it was John -- Mike McConnell came in and said we have some new information. He didn't tell me what the information was. He did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze.

So Mike McConnell comes strolling into the president's office, tells him we have new information concerning a country that's supposedly planning to nuke Israel (or Poland?) and Bush doesn't even ask for a quick summary. And he doesn't ask about it for 3 months!


video at ThinkProgress

Petraeus: what's a couple of missing weapons

..when you've got a crackerjack force like the Iraqi military.

These comments are infuriating:

"Some percentage" of weapons the U.S. military provided to the Iraqi army and Iraqi police units were not tracked by serial number because there were no procedures in place to do so within the Iraqi units, Petraeus said in an interview broadcast last night on Fox News Radio's "Alan Colmes Show."

From a practical standpoint, Petraeus added, it was more important to get the weapons to the Iraqis as they started to enter the fight against a strong insurgency than it was to keep meticulous records.

Of course the worry is that we've been arming the insurgency ourselves all this time. That Iraqi units have either gone AWOL, sold their weapons on the black market, acted as death squads against rival factions or turned those guns on American soldiers.

The president assigns "Why Bush will be a winner" to his staff

Believed to be a candid picture of George Bush (center) discussing his brilliant Iraq war strategy with his cracker jack staff Karl Rove (left) and Stephen Hadley (right). Also shown, Condoleeza Rice and Karen Hughes with their backs to the camera.

Bill Kristol's the-war-is-being-won piece in The Washington Post brought him plenty of ridicule, but at least one person liked it.

President Bush read the July 15 Outlook article that morning and recommended it to his staff.

Did I say September? I meant November.

Lt. General Odierno, live from Baghdad, says things are going great so far. But...

"Forty-five days from now, September 1 ... I'll be able to make a bit more accurate assessment if it's something we think is going to continue or something we think is just a blip," he said in a video link from Baghdad.

"In order to do a good assessment, I need at least till November to do that," Odierno added.

Oh and about those benchmarks....

In a separate session, [U.S. Ambassador Ryan] Crocker told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that political benchmarks set by President Bush for the Iraqi government were not necessarily the best way to measure progress.

You might remember those were the non-binding benchmarks the Republicans insisted should replace timelines, lest the terrorists win.