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Via Kevin Drum, a great piece on Iraq from Slate's Fred Kaplan. Forgive the long excerpt, but I want to make sure everyone reads this:

The dispute concerns what many regard as the Bush administration's single biggest mistake in the first few months after Saddam Hussein's ouster—the order, in May 2003, to disband the Iraqi army.

It was a move that put 250,000 young Iraqi men out of a job, out on the streets, angry, and armed—and all but guaranteed the violent chaos to come.

In Robert Draper's new book, Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush (which was excerpted in Slate), Bush blamed L. Paul Bremer, who was head of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority during the occupation's first year, for the decision.

"The policy had been to keep the [Iraqi] army intact; didn't happen," Bush told Draper. Asked how he had reacted to Bremer's reversal, Bush replied, "Yeah, I can't remember. I'm sure I said, 'This is the policy, what happened?' "

It is a stunning fact that—despite the massive library of in-depth books, tell-all memoirs, and investigative articles about every tactical decision regarding this war—we do not yet know who made this key strategic decision...

Did Rumsfeld write the order? Bob Woodward, in State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III, quotes Rumsfeld as saying that the order came from elsewhere. Does that mean it came from the White House? My guess is it came from Vice President Dick Cheney, if only because his is one of the most leakproof offices in Washington. Had the order originated someplace else, that fact would have leaked by now. It's like the dog that didn't bark in the Sherlock Holmes story; unbarking dogs in this administration, especially at this late date of decrepitude, tend to be the hounds in Cheney's kennel.

But where did Cheney get the idea? A good guess here is that it came from that familiar meddler of the era: the Iraqi exile, chief neocon guru, and suave banker-mathematician, Ahmad Chalabi.

Chalabi, recall, was interested in two things above all, once Saddam Hussein was toppled: removing Baathists from every level of activity in Iraqi politics and society and installing his militia, the Free Iraqi Forces, as the foundation of a new Iraqi army. (Soon after Saddam's overthrow, Wolfowitz arranged for a military transport plane to fly a few hundred of these militiamen to Nasiriya; they vanished almost instantly into the streets. After that, Chalabi had himself briefly appointed to head the official de-Baathification commission.)

In other words, CPA Orders No. 1 and 2 fit Chalabi's twin agendas perfectly...

On March 10, 2003, a week before the invasion, the National Security Council held a principals' meeting, attended by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet, the Joints Chiefs of Staff, and the top aides to all these officials. They decided that after the war, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission would be set up—similar to such panels in post-apartheid South Africa and post-Communist Eastern Europe—to ferret out the undesirable Baathists from those who could reliably work for a post-Saddam regime. Most Baathists were ordinary, even apolitical, people whose jobs required them to join the party. A rough calculation by NSC staffers and intelligence analysts was that only about 5 percent of the party—the leaders—would have to be removed, and even they would have the right to appeal.

On March 12, at another principals' meeting, on what to do about the Iraqi military, these same top U.S. officials decided to disband the Republican Guard—Saddam's elite corps and bodyguards—but to call the regular army's soldiers back to duty and to reconstitute their units after a proper vetting of their loyalties.

Both of these decisions were unanimous. NSC staff members had briefed officials on these plans before the meetings, up and down the chain of command, and they encountered no substantive dissent.

Most of these officials learned about Bremer's orders the way that most citizens did—by reading about them in the newspaper. Colin Powell, then secretary of state, called Gen. Peter Pace, then vice chairman of the JCS, and asked if he had known about the order. Pace replied that he hadn't and that none of the chiefs had been consulted.

In Baghdad, a U.S. Army colonel named Paul Hughes had spent weeks contacting officers of the Iraqi regular army, paying them to call up their troops to rejoin the new government—just as the NSC had directed. He was flabbergasted when Bremer's orders came down.

As I said the other day, Bush continually claims that one day history will vindicate him. He assumes that it will be years, even decades, before the history of this era will be written. But the world doesn't move as slowly as it once did - not even nearly - and the history of his time in office is already being written. We may not know who overrode the president's decision to form a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but we know who didn't do it. It's really only a matter of time, and likely not much time at that, until we learn who did.