Pace doesn't get it even in departure

Outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace commented on Iraq on Friday, and many of his perspectives were maddening.

In particular, he made one statement that is just outrageously misleading. He said,

One of the mistakes I made in my assumptions going in was that [...] the Iraqi Army, given the opportunity, would stand together for the Iraqi people and be available to them to help serve the new nation, [but] they disintegrated in the face of the coalition's first several weeks of combat, so they weren't here.

CNN further reports, "Had he known that would happen, he would have recommended more troops be sent at the outset of the Iraq war, he said."

These comments on the Iraqi army are unbelievably misleading. Just a few weeks ago there was a huge blowup over this issue when Paul Bremer tried to blame his decision to disband the Iraq army on his minders in the administration, and President Bush claimed not to remember having given any such order. Bremer responded by making public a letter that seemed to indicate he had cleared the decision with the administration, and round and round it went. The point being, it's firmly established that the Iraqi army didn't just "disintegrate," but rather was disbanded by the US. The attempt to blame Iraqi soldiers for somehow abandoning their country is mendacious and absurd.

It is true, however, that the US faced far less opposition than anticipated from regular Iraqi units. Irregular (guerrilla-type) Fedayeen forces were much more prevalent, and much of the Iraqi army did "melt away" from the American onslaught. It's not like the soldiers disappeared into thin air (they easily could have been reconstituted, absent the profoundly misguided decision to put tens of thousands of trained, armed Iraqis on the unemployment line) but they didn't put up the fight we anticipated at the beginning of the war.

So . . . does anyone really believe that if Pace knew the Iraqi army was going to fight much less than we thought he would have sent more American troops to Iraq? Considering nobody was planning for the post-invasion period, and there was overwhelming pressure to *minimize* the size of the invasion force, it's simply unbelievable that Pace honestly thinks he would have recommended sending more troops to Iraq in anticipation of less initial fighting. Just more revisionism from officials leaving the administration, in an attempt to pass blame to Anybody Else.