At the time it was an order of three things. They disbanded the nascent Iraqi National Guard we were training; they forced all reconstruction contracts to go through American contractors; and they banned any Baath party member from public employment and contracts with the coalition/government.

A first year political science student can see where that’s headed. I was a 19 year old Infantry private and I saw what that was going to do. Of course, I also saw the protests and was present for the meetings where locals told our commanders this was going to cause violence because if we didn’t rescind it, because it left large swaths of the population with no legitimate way to provide for their family. But there’s more information that isn’t widely publicized. We had been making an effort to sit on the ammo and ordnance stockpiles to prevent any post war partisan activity. By the end of the summer we had been called off of those and told locals would secure them. Nobody would take responsibility for the order either, just “came down from on high”.

We were absolutely setup as sacrificial lambs to the election cycle back home. Bush got a second term, and to be fair he probably would have if he brought us home right away too. But they didn’t run a former pilot and POW in 2008 by chance. It’s purely his choice of VP that tanked his chances. They wanted to foster instability right through the 2008 election. It left us with ISIS forming in the western Iraq desert and killed any chance of getting rid of the Taliban in Afghanistan. (By 2008 they were properly regrouped in Pashtunistan and no amount of combat operations would dislodge them again.) So they effectively sacrificed an entire country on the altar of domestic politics. I’m convinced they wouldn’t have cared if Iraq had fallen to ISIS either, just another reason to vote for the chicken hawks in their book.