This is a clear indication of how insidious this war has been undertaken. These mistakes, made by the Bush administration, are novice like at best.

LONDON, Nov. 26 — The retired general who headed the first occupation government in Iraq said Wednesday the United States made major mistakes, including disbanding the Iraqi army, putting too few troops on the ground and failing to explain the goals of the war.

Bremer’s decision to disband the Iraqi army effectively threw hundreds of thousands of breadwinners out of work and provided potential recruits for insurgency, he said. The original plan had been to pay the army to take part in reconstruction work.

He also acknowledged that not enough effort was put into winning over ordinary Iraqis by getting America’s message across to them after the war. “We did a bad job of executing that. There’s no excuse for that. The consequence of that is all they got to listen to was Arab-language TV station al-Jazeera,” he said.

Garner also complained of bad relations between the Pentagon and State Department, saying he didn’t learn of a detailed study by Secretary of State Colin Powell for post-war Iraq until just a few weeks before the war began in March.

“There’s intense rivalries between all the agencies [in Washington], but that didn’t start with this war, that’s been going on ever since we had an interagency” he said. “I mean, it’s just part of Washington.”