WHERE DID ALL THE SOLDIERS GO?
If Rumsfeld had initially handed over the postwar planning to Garner, once Baghdad fell he didn't relinquish control. And that places Rumsfeld in the vicinity of one of the great miscalculations of the year: the decision in late May to disband the Iraqi army, which basically put hundreds of thousands of young men out on the Iraqi streets without work. The story of the demobilization makes clear that even when Garner did have a blueprint for what was to follow, the U.S. couldn't or wouldn't stick to it.

All through last winter, the big worry had been the life-and-death stuff, not schools and sewers. Garner's to-do list read like the table of contents from the Book of Apocalypse: food panics; blazing oil rigs; a nuclear, chemical or biological exchange with wmd-contaminated provinces to quarantine; water shortages; a three-month siege of Baghdad; cross-border refugee flows; and ethnic conflict or cleansing. It was lucky that none of those things happened, but nobody gets credit for the bullets they dodge. The U.S. authorities were left less prepared for the different kind of chaos that followed.

Garner wanted to preserve a portion of the 400,000-man Iraqi army in part to help keep the peace when the shooting stopped. The U.S. expected thousands of Iraqi troops to surrender, as they had in 1991. "We had planned on keeping the army together and using it pretty actively in the reconstruction of Iraq," Garner tells TIME . "But our planning was somewhat flawed in that the army didn't surrender."

Instead, it just disappeared. Douglas Feith, a top Rumsfeld aide and the Pentagon's policy chief, says, "The army in effect disbanded itself" as the U.S. swept into Baghdad. But within a few weeks, soldiers began to reappear, looking for work. They started showing up in May, Garner recalls. "We had planned to use them for a variety of things. They had skill sets we needed for reconstruction, clearing rubble, working on roads." The idea was to pay each of them $40 a month. The funds would come from the nearly $1.7 billion in Iraqi money frozen by the U.S. "I briefed everybody on that—[Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and the President—and nobody said no," Garner says. Retired U.S. Army Lieut. General Paul Cerjan, who had been hired to oversee this effort for Garner, says, "Our plan was designed to put them to work in footprints around the country, keep them at home, pay them every night so the next morning Mama would kick their ass out of the house and tell them to go back and get another dollar. You have to get the angry young men off the street. If that had happened, we would have had a lot of people back to work, and the unemployment levels wouldn't be at 70%."

But instead of remobilizing the Iraqi army, Washington simply dissolved it on May 23. Coalition Provisional Authority chief L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer arrived and did away with the Ministry of Defense and the plan to pay the Iraqis. "I don't lay that at Jerry Bremer's feet." Garner says. "He came over with a briefcase full of orders."

U.S. officials said at the time their hand had been forced because the old army had dissolved and the Iraqi army posts had been so thoroughly looted that the U.S. lacked the infrastructure to support a remobilized militia. Also, there were fears among the U.S. honchos in Baghdad that a standing national army would be as much a force for instability as for stability. And there was another worry: in the days after Saddam fell and his circle of advisers disappeared, the U.S. had no idea whom it could trust in the Iraqi chain of command. Faced with those unknown unknowns, as Rumsfeld might say, Washington simply bagged the whole force.

Who made that call? White House aides finger Bremer. Bremer aide Walter Slocombe claims some responsibility, but it's unlikely that a Clinton-era Democrat like Slocombe would have been allowed to make such a big decision. Wolfowitz says the decision to disband the army was unanimous. Asked whether it was Rummy's call, Feith says, "You could say that."

Rumsfeld admits as much, in his way. Actually, he has three answers. Short: "I don't remember." Medium: "Everything that gets done—good, bad or ugly—is mine." And long: " It's perfectly right for people to debate whether it was a right or wrong decision. I haven't got time for that. My interest is, Let's get more of these guys recruited, let's get on with building the Iraqi security forces, let's create the training. That's what I'm focused on." Besides, Rumsfeld hints that the back-and-forth about demobilization no longer matters because the "overwhelming majority" of the new Iraqi army is made up of conscripts and soldiers from the old force.

Perhaps, but the U.S. lost four to six months in the process of deciding that its initial plan was the best one after all. A Pentagon civilian close to Rumsfeld admits, "We shouldn't have disbanded the army."

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