It is yet another myth that we "disbanded" the Army. For the most part, the Iraqi Army evaporated into piles of civilians, heading for the tall grass, in front of our eyes.

To listen to some people, you'd think we'd lined them up in uniform, stripped their buttons off, and told them to go home.

We did get rid of a lot of the Baathist leadership of the Army--when we could find them--much like we got rid of the Nazi leadership of the German military.

Incidentally, how much of a role did active Japanese and German armed forces have in maintaining order in post-war Japan and Germany? I actually don't know the answer to that question. I do know our occupations were a lot more heavy-handed than our occupation of Iraq, which may be part of the problem in Iraq.

It is an interesting idea that we might have simply plugged our own commanders into a Soviet-style organization. Would we have been willing to use the methods such an organization used to keep things in line, and suppress the natural ethnic influences? It sounds suspiciously like the theory that all we needed to do to have democracy rise up in Iraq is get rid of the dictatorship. I doubt it would have been that easy, and trying to use the existing structure would have raised at least as many problems as having to reconstruct a system with more lower-echelon authority from scratch.

And of course, it assumes that the Iraq Army had stayed put to be commanded.