Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [278]
After Bremer announced the policy in May, he appointed Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi Shia majority, to administer it. With Chalabi in charge, just as the President had feared, de-Baathification gained a reputation for score settling. Stories circulated about schoolteachers who were fired, former Baathist officials who were beaten in the streets, and even murders—acts that the CPA had not authorized, condoned, or had even minimal control over.
De-Baathification inflamed the minority Sunnis, who saw it as an act of vengeance against them as a group. Sunnis justifiably argued that while many of them had been forced to participate in the Baathist government, they were not all complicit in Saddam’s crimes. The policy, and how it was administered, led some Sunnis to become embittered against the American presence in Iraq.
CPA Order Number 2—the decision to disband the Iraqi army—has since become one of the most criticized decisions of the war. Of the dozens of important decisions made during that week in May 2003, it was not one that stuck out with unique prominence at the time. But in hindsight, its importance is unmistakable.
Disbanding the army was not my instinct. Everything I wanted to do in Iraq was tied to the thought that we should have the Iraqis doing as much for themselves as possible. If we disbanded the army, it would mean that as many as four hundred thousand young Iraqi men would be put out of jobs and onto the streets. Some were armed, had military training, and could become susceptible to calls for resistance against the United States, coalition forces, and the new Iraqi government.
Before the war I had agreed it would be wise to keep the Iraqi army as a reconstruction corps—something loosely resembling FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps. In January 2003, Feith and his staff, working with the Joint Staff, drafted a briefing called “Rebuilding the Iraqi Military” that recommended retaining the regular army.27 One month later, at a February 26 meeting, Pentagon representatives briefed the NSC principals on the DoD plans for what they called “the reintegration of the regular army.” Under the plan, those structures of the military that were tainted with the crimes of the Baath regime—the Republican Guard and secret police among them—would be dissolved, but the regular army would be retained to assist in keeping security. The proposal would use the army “as a national reconstruction force during the transition phase.”28 The assumption was that they had structure and manpower as well as skills and equipment that could be valuable assets. By March, the brief was updated with the recommendation that following combat operations in Iraq, the army “should ‘maintain its current status in assembly areas and permanent garrisons.’”29 In short, the Iraqi army would be retrained and used as an instrument of defense of the new Iraqi state.
But I was aware that there were some downsides to keeping it in the form we found it. Controlled by Sunni officers loyal to Saddam, the army had been an instrument of terror against many Shia and Kurds. It was bloated with senior officers—eleven thousand generals, almost all of them Sunnis.30 (By comparison, the U.S. Army, about the same size as Saddam’s, had about three hundred generals.) Corruption was deeply ingrained. The Kurds and Shia, together composing 80 percent of Iraq’s population, would also vehemently oppose any attempt to retain Saddam’s army. We had to ask whether it made sense to risk alienating the vast majority of Iraqis by trying to keep and reconstitute the army. I concluded that the benefits outweighed the risks, and that we would keep it intact to help with security and reconstruction.
The calculus changed, however, as coalition troops drove north to Baghdad. Faced with the prospects of death or capture if they engaged our coalition