We Were Right to Disband Them

Tom Donnelly argues in the Weekly Standard that Bremer's decision to disband the Irarqi military was the correct one. We agree with his assessment:

Ultimately, it is putting the cart before the horse to believe that there can ever be fully legitimate and effective national military forces prior to the birth of a legitimate national government. Our greatest postwar military mistake in Iraq was thus not that we disbanded the old Iraqi army too quickly but that we moved to create a new Iraqi state too slowly.

We've stated as much in previous posts on this page. The problem in the immediate aftermath of the invasion was a lack of planning to create a new Iraqi government. This created a vacuum that was filled with the insurgency, who thought it had a hope of returning to the old regime. Were our successful invasion to have been more aggressively exploited politically, the insurgency might not have coalesced as strongly as it did. This is all for the history books though. We're still going to win.