Garner drew up detailed plans and, at his first briefing with President Bush, outlined three essential "musts" that would, he asserted, ensure a smooth transition after the war. The first "must", he said, was that the Iraqi military should not be disbanded. The second "must" was that the 50,000-strong Ba'ath party machine that ran government services should not be broken up or its members proscribed. If either were to happen, he warned, there would be chaos compounded by thousands of unemployed, armed Iraqis running around. And the third "must", he insisted, was that an interim Iraqi leadership group, eager to help the United States administer the country in the short term, should be kept on-side.
Well, I won't comment on the last one because I have no idea what the British term "on-side" means. Does it mean put it in place? Keep it ready but out of sight? If the former, I'll grant that we should have done that. Iraqis should have been giving briefings from early on. But if keeping authority in our hands was a mistake, recall that opponents of the war wanted the transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis delayed every time a deadline came up--whether for interim appointed authority, voting for an interim government, or voting on a constitution.
But the first two are clearly just bad ideas. How could we appeal to Shias if we had kept the Baathist government machinery in place? How could we keep the Baathist military intact when it was not trustworthy and the insturment of oppressing and slaughering the Kurds and Shias?
How much worse would spring 2004 have been if the Shias had been alienated from us by these policies in "the plan" just as the enemy counter-offensive began? Baathist-run agencies would have openly delcared for the insurgents and Shias would have rallied to Sadr. It would have been a revolt on the order of the Sepoy Mutiny (at the time, because it was not a wide revolt, I wrote that people should calm down because it was not the Sepoy Mutiny of 2004).
Just because we had a "plan" doesn't mean we had a good plan. I know some of us have elevated the concept of the perfect plan to a fifth Gospel, but I'm glad we junked the plan described.
The plan was always to destroy the Baathist government--not to send the Baathists to sensitivity training and tell them to sin no more.
UPDATE: A longer critique of the charge that de-Baathification was a mistake.
