Former US special envoy to Iraq Paul Bremer defended his record following the 2003 invasion, but admitted there were problems with policies “based on the wrong assumption” in an exclusive interview with FRANCE 24 on Thursday.

Speaking to FRANCE 24’s Douglas Herbert from Washington DC, Bremer put up a strong – at times pugnacious – defence of the US decision to ban the ruling Baath Party and disband the Iraqi Army in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. Critics charge that these two decisions set the stage for the crisis currently gripping Iraq.

“Those are two of the prevalent myths,” said Bremer dismissively.

“Let me start with the Baath Party,” he continued. “Actually, it was [US] General [Tommy] Franks who outlawed the Baath Party. What I did was to say to the top one percent of the Baath Party that they could no longer work in the government. They were perfectly free to go and set up businesses, go farming, whatever they wanted to do… set up newspapers. The mistake I made was the implementation of that very narrowly defined decree. I turned it over to Iraqi politicians and they then implemented it much more broadly.”

On the issue of disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era Iraqi Army, Bremer insisted that “there was no army to disband”.

According to the former US presidential envoy, following the March 2003 US military operation, the Iraqi Army’s 300,000 “mostly-Shiite conscripts” as well as the 415,000 “mostly-Sunni” officers dispersed and “simply went home” when they saw the way the war was going.

“The question we faced was whether to recall a disbanded army. There were both practical and political reasons to avoid that,” said Bremer.

The primary political reason was that Iraqi Kurdish leaders, when they heard rumors that the Iraqi Army might be recalled, threatened to secede from Iraq.

More than a decade later, the hardline jihadist ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria, sometimes also known as ISIL) has swept through northwestern Iraq, seizing territory that abuts the autonomous Kurdish region.

Calling for ‘boots on the ground’

Bremer’s interview with FRANCE 24 came a day after former US vice president Dick Cheney criticised US President Barack Obama’s troop withdrawal plans in Iraq and Afghanistan in a "Wall Street Journal" column that concluded that Obama “abandoned Iraq, and we are watching American defeat snatched from the jaws of victory”.

The inner circle of officials and advisors to former US President George W. Bush have hit the airwaves in the US in recent days, defending their actions during one of America’s most controversial foreign military engagements.

Bremer has been advocating the deployment of US “boots on the ground” in Iraq – a position that has incensed his opponents back home in a country exhausted with US military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Speaking to FRANCE 24, Bremer said he was not denying the risks of such a strategy. But, he added, “I think the interests of the United States identified by the President [Obama] and reconfirmed yesterday by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [General Martin Dempsey] are very substantial and they will require American action – quickly.”

But while Dempsey may have identified US interests in the region, America’s highest-ranking military officer was not as clear about how to achieve those interests.

Speaking before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday, Dempsey noted that pinpointing targets in Iraq for an air campaign would be difficult, especially given that Sunni insurgents have melted into the local population.

“It’s not as easy as looking at an iPhone video of a convoy and then immediately striking,” he said.

France24