Et tu, Breme?
So here we go again: A former Bush administration official says — after the fact — that the central critiques of administration policy were entirely correct.
In this case, the admission is that the US never had enough troops in Iraq to get the job done. On top of that, there is a critical subsidiary point: that the US lost vital and perhaps irrecoverable ground in the first days and weeks of the occupation by not ending the widespread looting and not moving quickly enough to restore law and order.
“We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness,” said Bremer, according to the Post, “We never had enough troops on the ground.”
Needless to say, this wasn’t just a critique mounted by political opponents but a prediction made far in advance of the outbreak of hostilities by many of the president’s statutory advisors — like Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki.
As Atrios notes, we’re already hearing the chorus of Bush leakers whipping up the cry that Bremer is a liar and some sort of hopeless fool who was lucky not to get canned for all the mistakes he made — a la, Clarke, O’Neill and all the rest.
What strikes me in the Post article is Bremer’s contention, contained in an email he sent to the article’s authors, that his contention that the US had insufficient troops applies to the immediate post-invasion period rather than to today.
Partly, this dodges the question. There’s a lot of time between April/May 2003 and Sept./Oct. 2004. Most of that time, Bremer was in charge.
The key though is that it’s hard to argue that the US had too few troops on the ground in June 2003 or December 2003 or March 2004 and yet has an adequate amount today when the situation has deteriorated so dramatically.
Not impossible, but very hard.
The whole point of coming in early with a robust occupying force is that you can establish law and order early with a number of troops that might not be able to re-establish order once things have spun out of control. The number of troops needed to put the genie back in the bottle, almost by definition, has to be greater than the number that would have been needed to stop it getting out in the first place.
Where was James Q. Wilson when these jokers needed him?
