Posted on 01/29/2006 12:26:35 AM PST by neverdem
THE persistence of the insurgency in Iraq has divided America in a way not seen since Vietnam. Now the blame game among the principals has begun. The former presidential envoy to Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, has written in his new memoir that he informed President Bush that the military did not have "a strategy to win."
Quite. The lesson the Pentagon should learn from Iraq is to avoid another L. Paul Bremer. This is less a reflection on Mr. Bremer, who accurately described himself as "the American viceroy" in Iraq and "the president's man," than on the position he and the American military commanders in Iraq were placed in by the White House's failure to put one person in charge.
In 1967, when confusion among military and civilian officials in Vietnam was undermining the war effort, President Lyndon B. Johnson placed all civilian reconstruction and security functions under the top general, William Westmoreland, insuring unity of command under Westmoreland's successor Creighton Abrams. Confronting similar confusion in Iraq, President Bush unfortunately assigned to the military the responsibility for security but gave Mr. Bremer the authority to shape, recruit, train and finance the Iraqi military and police.
Mr. Bremer writes that he believed the Iraqi military should not "have internal security duties" and that the police should be trained by American civilians. But not enough civilians ever arrived to do the job. Mr. Bremer was unable to design a strategy for building up the Iraqi military and police. This failure extended the period in which the American military had to do the fighting while also taking over the training of both Mr. Bremer's new army and the police.
This disunity of command reached its tragic apex in the spring of 2004, during what Mr. Bremer calls "the most critical crisis of..."
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Are you back in thea-tah, dahling?
Negative, and time is running out. Just waiting on the medics & HR.
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