Forward Observer: General Garner’s Lament
When it comes to Iraq, Lt. Gen. Jay Garner has been there, done that for 15 years, so his new plan for getting out of the mess there might be worth listening to.
“You couldn’t have gotten the 10 most brilliant men and women in America to design a way for us to fail in Iraq that would have been any better than what we have done on our own,” lamented Garner, whom President Bush dispatched to Iraq to heal the country only to stand aside as Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III gutted the very post-combat pacification program that Garner had gotten the president to approve.
“I was never able to find out,” Garner answered when I asked him where Bremer got the authority to reverse the presidentially approved plan shortly after taking over from the retired three-star general in Baghdad in May 2003.
Garner’s plan called for keeping most of the Iraqi army intact rather than send thousands of troopers home with rifles but no jobs and to allow Iraqi school teachers and other vital professionals to keep working even if they had been forced to join Saddam Hussein’s Baathist party.
“He just did it,” Garner said of Bremer’s scrapping of those two major parts of the general’s master plan for putting Iraq back together again after Saddam fell. “Maybe Bush didn’t know he was doing it.”
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1206/120406cdam2.htm
“Garner’s plan called for keeping most of the Iraqi army intact rather than send thousands of troopers home with rifles but no jobs and to allow Iraqi school teachers and other vital professionals to keep working even if they had been forced to join Saddam Hussein’s Baathist party.”
Im not so sure I would be willing to give power back to a group connected to terrorism.
Baathist papers confirm Hussein’s terrorist ties
http://www.shns.com/shns/g_index2.cfm?action=detail&pk=MURDOCK-04-06-06