DE-BAATHIFICATION….Former British Home Secretary David Blunkett, whose diary will begin serialization in the Guardian on Monday, says that it wasn’t Paul Bremer who favored dismantling the Iraqi military after the invasion:
A member of the war cabinet, he reveals that Britain battled with the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, and defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, not to press ahead with dismantling “the whole of the security, policing, administrative and local government system on the basis of the de-Ba’athification of Iraq.
“The issue was: ‘What the hell do you do about it?’ All we could do as a nation of 60 million off the coast of mainland Europe was to seek to influence the most powerful nation in the world. We did seek to influence them, but we were not in charge, so you cannot say that if only the government recognised what needed to be done, it would all have been different. The government did recognise the problem.”
I don’t suppose this is really surprising news or anything ? did we ever really think Bremer made this decision on his own? ? but it’s nice to see confirmation. Yet another disastrous miscalculation from the dynamic duo of Cheney and Rumsfeld. Have these guys ever gotten anything right?
