REVIEW: "The Bremer Paradox: The standard criticism of the former head of Iraq's rebuilding is groundless. His real mistake was behaving like a proconsul (My Year in Iraq by L. Paul Bremer, with Malcolm McConnell)," by Robert L. Pollack, Wall Street Journal, 14 January 2006, p. P10.

Very solid review worth reading. Basic premise: Bremer exaggerates how bad it was when he came in, but his decisions to disband the Iraqi army and ban Baathists from power were right. His real problem? He was a control freak who screwed up the security and didn't put an Iraqi face on the process early enough. Even today as the locals run things, Bremer denigrates them as weak compared to his own firm hand.

In short, Bremer didn't understand his role then and still doesn't today. We lack this kind of postwar talent on the civilian side, and it cost us dearly in Iraq.

This is why I call for a Department of Everything Else, not just some tiny office tacked on to State.

My one gripe with Pollack is the notion that the quick disbanding of the Iraqi army was necessary to get buy-in from Shiites and Kurds. But this is a highly debatable point. Me, I would assume an insurgency of loyalists is always in the cards, so be prepared to beat back that danger first and risk the civil war-like split with other groups in the meantime(and there are always persecuted minority/majority groups like this in this pretend colonial states created by the Europeans decades ago--that the was the entire design purpose!) because, as we learned here, if the insurgency grows big enough, they can trigger that civil war on their own anyway by forcing your counter-insurgency toward solution sets that raise that danger.

But overall a real solid and penetrating review.