MER - On Iraq, U.S. Turns to Onetime Dissenters

<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> "This is a big mistake," Carney thought in May 2003, when Bremer told senior CPA officials that he would soon issue an edict prohibiting many former members of Hussein's Baath Party from holding government jobs. The one-and-a-half-page decree, which was drafted in the Pentagon office of then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith, banned anyone who had been in the party's top four ranks; it also banned hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file members from holding senior management positions in government ministries...<br><br>Petraeus, who spent 2003 commanding the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul, grew dismayed by the heavy-handed tactics fellow military commanders were using to combat insurgents. He also opposed the methods by which Bremer disbanded the Iraqi army and fired Baathists from government jobs. And he chafed at the way reconstruction funds, personnel and decision-making were centralized in Baghdad. The CPA's policies, he said in 2004, should have been "tempered by reality." <b on></b> </body>