For anyone who missed it, I would recommend watching last week's Frontline "The Lost Year in Iraq," which recounted the colossal mistakes made initially by Rummy & Co. in the early days of the occupation. Looking back now you can see how things might have gone differently if Rummy and Cheney hadn't been so amazingly arrogant and self-assured of their own infallibility. If they hadn't ignored experts in the State Department and CIA, who had experience with these sorts of things, we might not be looking at the looming disaster we're faced with now. It is really stunning to see how they made precisely the wrong decision at every single turn. Rummy was wrong 100% of the time, from his saying that he knew exactly where the WMD were to reducing by the half the number of beds at Landstuhl just before the war started.
Appointing Henry Kissinger's protégé to run the whole show, though, will have to go down in history as the most monumentally damaging one of the entire occupations. The litany of errors and missteps made by L. Paul Bremer highlighted in the Frontline report, from the moment he arrived in the Green Zone, is must see TV for anyone wondering how we got to where we are today. With his first two CPA special orders; firing 20,000 Iraqi government employees with Baathist connections; and then throwing 100,000 Iraqi men with weapons and no income into the streets; he in effect created the insurgency. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to overstate how incredibly incompetent Rummy has been in this entire fiasco. If there was any one person who should serve jail time for Iraq, it's Rummy. It's really all on him.
