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What we NEED are Iraqi security forces that can help patrol the streets that are reliable.

Perhaps I'm just a little ole ignorant feller from flyover country, but isn't turning control over to a Republican Guard general just a little like as if we had turned over security in Germany to the Waffen SS in 1946?

"Perhaps I'm just a little ole ignorant feller from flyover country,"

arent we all here? :-)

"... but isn't turning control over to a Republican Guard general just a little like as if we had turned over security in Germany to the Waffen SS in 1946?"

This has been hashed on many threads. Plenty of ex-WWII German military ended up in post WWII German military. Also, USA did find many Nazi spies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere useful when the cold war heated up. We forbade the Nazi party, but we didnt prevent former nazi party members from being in Government at all.

This is an act of co-option. It seems the policy of extreme debaathification that we followed simply made half a million of the countries governing and military elite unemployed, bitter and hostile to us. ... Was that smart? IN retrospect, it has been a big source of our trouble in Iraq.

We have to bring some of the ones on board that *dont* want to bring back baathist policies but *do* have the skills to build Iraqi institutions in the new Iraq. The real question is whether this mans loyalties are to a democratic and stable Iraq. That is our goal, and Iraqis who were not criminals or torturers in their past and are willing to help that should be welcomed.

I'd refer you to Bremer's speech a few weeks back on the matter.