Word: baing
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...Shortly before going to Baghdad, Bremer met with Doug Feith in the Pentagon. Feith, he says, urged him to issue an order as soon as possible upon arriving in Iraq that would prevent former Ba'ath Party members from having a role in the new government. Bremer did just that, on May 16, just four days after landing in Iraq. That morning's New York Times carried a hint of what was to come: "Shortly I will issue an order on measures to extirpate Baathists and Baathism in Iraq forever," Bremer was quoted as saying. "We have and will aggressively...
...community estimated that this order would affect only about 1 percent of the Iraqi population. That could be taken to imply that [CIA] supported the move and thought it was a good idea, but that was definitely not the case. In fact, we knew nothing about it until de-Ba'athification was a fiat accompli. Clearly, this was a critical policy decision, yet there was no NSC Principals meeting to debate the move. As for the 1 percent number Bremer cites, he didn't ask for that estimate until the date after he issued the order, and once...
...soon began hearing stories about how Iraqis could not send their kids to school because all the teachers had been dismissed for being members of the Ba'ath Party. In the context of a country armed to the teeth, this was not a good thing. If the kids and teachers were not in school, they were on the streets. I went to see Condi Rice and complained that the indiscriminate nature of the de-Ba'athification order had swept away not just Saddam's thugs but also, for example, something like forty thousand schoolteachers, who had joined the Ba...
...Bremer's de-Ba'athification order became known as CPA Proclamation Number One. As bad as that was, CPA Proclamation Number Two was worse. Again, without any formal discussion or debate back in Washington-at least any that included me or my top deputies-Bremer, on May 23, ordered the dissolution of the Iraqi army...
...common Iraqis and given them few prospects beyond being paupers, criminals, or insurgents. One of our senior officers tallied the numbers, including affected family members and the like, and came up with a pool of a hundred thousand Iraqis who had been driven toward the brink by the de-Ba'athification order alone. In the end, too many of them chose insurgency...