You might want to consider adding an update with the Bremer article just now cited by Instapundit. In the course of defending the decision to disband the (mostly evaporated) Iraqi army, Bremer states:

Moreover, we were right to build a new Iraqi Army. Despite all the difficulties encountered, Iraq’s new professional soldiers are the country’s most effective and trusted security force. By contrast, the Baathist-era police force, which we did recall to duty, has proven unreliable and is mistrusted by the very Iraqi people it is supposed to protect.

“The review is one of several studies that Congress commissioned in May, when it agreed to fund the war for several more months but demanded that the Bush administration and outside groups assess U.S. progress in the four-year war.”

So, do retired officers get to wear their uniforms when they testify for Congress too? ‘Cause playing a “military” card against Petraeus is what this is really about. And making this about the corrupt Iraqi police, of course, instead of the successful Iraqi army.

A blue ribbon commission chaired by former Supreme Allied Commander James Jones* has concluded that the Iraqi national police are so corrupt that they should be disbanded and recreated from scratch and that the Iraqi army is still more than a year away…

Been there, done that . The AP needs to work on their sourcing. BAGHDAD – At least 14 people were killed early Thursday in a U.S. attack on a western Baghdad neighborhood, police and residents said. The U.S. command in…

Meanwhile, House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) sent a letter to the White House to protest President Bush’s criticism of Congress while attending a conference in Australia. He said it violated the principle that “partisanship ends at the water’s edge.”

This is rich.

Emanuel is one of the MOST VICIOUSLY PARTISAN members of the House. When he worked for the Clintons, he threatened, blackmailed, and destroyed people’s reputation to make sure people do what Clinton wanted. He was a HIT MAN.

And yet, this SOB DARES to complain about partisanship and the water’s edge when he and his party of liars and traitors openly undermine the President around the world?

IM to Rahm: GET SCREWED! STRONG LETTER TO FOLLOW!

Sadr would be a good one to tweak, as per Defector01′s suggestion.

Strong men at the top can steer the group below them.

Don’t throw out the group, which might be reoriented, but scrub the malignant head.

In his autobiography, American Soldier, Tommy Franks said of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith: “They could see I was serious. ‘I’ll worry about OSD, all of them – including Doug Feith, who’s getting a reputation around here as the dumbest @ucking guy on the planet.‘”

He left after two months, disgusted and disillusioned. The U.S. occupation administration in Iraq, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), placed ideology over pragmatism, he believed. His boss, viceroy L. Paul Bremer, refused to pay for repairs needed to reopen many looted state-owned factories, even though they had employed tens of thousands of Iraqis.

‘This is a big mistake,’ Carney thought in May 2003, when Bremer told senior CPA officials that he would soon issue an edict prohibiting many former members of Hussein’s Baath Party from holding government jobs. The one-and-a-half-page decree, which was drafted in the Pentagon office of then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith, banned anyone who had been in the party’s top four ranks; it also banned hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file members from holding senior management positions in government ministries. Bremer’s stated goal was to cleanse Iraq’s government of the former president’s cronies.

Carney and the other Americans tapped to run Iraq’s ministries knew that the senior managers in almost all government departments were Baathists. Hussein’s government had forced them to join the party, but that didn’t mean they all had blood on their hands or that they were all close associates of the former leader. And without them, it would be much more challenging to get the government running again.

With unemployment at more than 40 percent, Carney also knew that anyone kicked out of a government job wasn’t going to find work elsewhere. They would be unemployed and angry.