Seizing Defeat Out of the Jaws of Victory?

Black Swan

You would think that it was bad enough that the US Congress and American people were misled to believe that they were threatened with (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction, as well as (false) connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda by the Bush-Cheney administration as justification for starting the Second Gulf War (Iraq II)? But it got worse after Saddam's military had been quickly defeated on the ground when the Bush-Cheney administration followed-up the military victory with sheer political stupidity by their all encompassing De-Baathification policy in Iraq?

"The decision to purge members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party was made by the very same neoconservatives in the Pentagon who cherry-picked bits of intelligence to justify their case for invading Iraq. To them, it would be a definitive statement of victory, akin to de-Nazification after World War II, and they dispatched viceroy L. Paul Bremer III to Baghdad with the edict in his briefcase. He issued it on his fourth day in Iraq, over the objections of the CIA station chief. Written with input from Ahmad Chalabi and other exiles who promised that U.S. troops would be greeted with flowers, Coalition Provisional Authority Order No. 1 didn’t just ban high-level Baathists from top government jobs. It prevented tens of thousands of Iraqis who were low-level party members—people who had joined to avoid police harassment or secure college admission for their children—from returning to their jobs in factories, in schools, in hospitals. Unlike in postwar Germany, the government was the principal employer in Iraq. Overnight, legions of Iraqis found themselves without work and without the prospect of ever finding a decent job. Among them were 15,000 teachers. A week later, Bremer dissolved the Iraqi Army. The two decisions did more than anything else to transform the U.S. effort to rebuild the country into a bloody, chaotic mess. Faced with no future in the new Iraq, it was only natural that many of newly dispossessed would take up arms. But the neocons who led us into the war never fully thought through the consequences of their actions."

Source: http://2010.newsweek.com/top-10/tactical-blunders/de-baathification.html

Iraq II still rages on, but not on the conventional battlefield; rather, on the streets of their cities, and between them with roadside bombs. More US troops were killed during the occupation than during the war? Would this transition from symmetrical to asymmetrical warfare have occurred to the huge extent that it has, if this post-war policy had not been adopted? Would the asymmetrical war have ended sooner without this policy in effect?

Was the Bush-Cheney administration completely clueless in terms of what to do following the defeat of the Iraqi conventional military, or how their unilateral decision to purge anyone remotely associated with the Baath Party would affect the follow-up administration of a defeated Iraq? Were they afraid of being accused of using the former government administrators as General George Patton was following the defeat and occupation of Germany in WWII?

Manic Moran

A level of de-ba'athification would have been not only viable, but probably required. Maybe not to the level of "You cannot be a librarian because you were a ba'ath party member", but to a fair extent. Disbanding the Army was arguably one of the more dangerous moves, but there is also something to be said for starting over if the Army itself was as politicised as the government and thus part of the original problem.

NTM

Mahatma coat

IMO the NeoCons knew exactly what they were doing, the idea was to destabalise Iraq in the first weeks to such an extent that there could be no discussion of an exit strategy thereby giving the MilitaryIndustrial Complex its much desired war without end and bolstering up the balance sheets.

the other part to it is the use of Private contractors instead of regular military forces.

the chaos was premeditated to maximise profits

diverdriver

No, Mahatma they would have made more money if Iraq was more peaceful. They screwed up royally. Conspiracy theories are great but one thing the neo cons were good at was getting it completely wrong.

My favourite anecdote was the one from a British official who was handed a document outlining policies and procedures for the occupation of Iraq. In it was stated that the official currencies would only be the Reichmark or the US dollar. It rapidly dawned on the official that this was simply a re-write of document used for the occupation of Germany after WW2 and someone had overlooked this particular paragraph.

Mahatma coat

Well DiverDriver if their intention had been the Peaceful reconstruction of a Nation and its Transition to 'Western Democracy' then yeah they would have been better off not destroying Iraq, but that wasnt their plan, the plan was Massive US Military expenditure to prop up the US War machine, they even made a half arsed job of stealin the Oil.