Decider -in-Chief Exposed

There is an excellent "oral history" of the Bush administration in an article in Vanity Fair by Cullen Murphy and Todd S. Purdum. Lots of insights.

Here is a good summary of the muddle of the "Decider" and the way he ran his government's decision-making:

Jay Garner, retired army general and first overseer of the U.S. administration and reconstruction of Iraq: My plan was to not disband the Iraqi Army but to keep the majority of it and use them. And the reason for that is we needed them, because, number one, there were never enough people there for security. I mean, I’ll give you an example. My first day in Baghdad, I went to see Scott Wallace, who was the corps commander, the V Corps commander, and I said, Scott, I need a lot of help here on security. And he said, Let me show you my map. I walked over to the map. And he had 256 sites that day he was guarding that he had never planned on. He just didn’t have the force structure to do it.

So we said, O.K., we’ll bring the army back. Our plan was to bring back about 250,000 of them. And I briefed Rumsfeld. He agreed. Wolfowitz agreed. Condoleezza Rice agreed. George [Tenet] agreed. Briefed the president on it. He agreed. Everybody agreed.

So when that decision [to disband] was made, I was stunned.