Retired General Jay Garner was on one of the talk shows this week end and he opined that our mistake was not keeping the Iraqi Army in one piece after the fall of Saddam. Garner claims the de-Baathification [the process of removing the members and influence of the Ba'ath Party from public office in Iraq following the US-led invasion of 2003] was not the original plan. The Bush Administration selected Lieutenant General Jay Garner to lead the Coalition Provisional Authority (an intermediary government) in an attempt to rid Iraq of the chaos and anarchy that consumed the area. Garner's plan was to choose government officials from the former Iraqi regime to help lead the country. I suspect his [Garner's] objections to the de-Baath process and his efforts at helping the Kurds, led to his removal and replacement by the odious Paul Bremer, former Managing Director of Kissinger and Associates. Little more need be said.
General Garner entered the military as a United States Marine and later enlisted in the Army. Following his commissioning, he served two tours in Vietnam, first in 1967-68 as an infantry adviser in the central highlands, and as a district senior adviser in 1971-72 in the strategic hamlet program, which involved relocating Vietnamese in remote villages into areas heavily defended by American forces, he said. Over all, he said, the war in Vietnam was a failure because the United States had the ''wrong military objective.''
In the above photo he is shown wearing a Montagnard tribal Bracelet on his right wrist. I suspect he knows a bit about tribal politics and ethnic histories, not that that would matter to the Kissinger and Associates or the folks circling the drain in and around Foggy Bottom.