Bremer: More troops were needed after Saddam's ouster

First Colin, then Tenet, then Rumsfeld, and now Bremer. You get the sense that Bush's closest people are smelling defeat and have decided to go out with a clean conscience.

Coming on the heels of Rumsfeld's admission that there was no "hard evidence" of an Al-Qaeda-Saddam link and that the intelligence about Saddam's WMD was wrong, another body blow for the Bush administration, this time from Paul Bremer.

The former U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq says the United States "paid a big price" for not having enough troops on the ground after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime.

L. Paul Bremer, speaking Monday at an insurance conference in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, said "horrid" looting was occurring when he arrived to head the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad on May 6, 2003.

"We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness," Bremer said. "We never had enough troops on the ground."

Bremer added that ousting Saddam was "the right thing to do."

A senior Defense Department official said that Bremer never asked for more troops and expressed annoyance the ambassador appeared to be second-guessing the advice of military officials. Bremer stepped down after the June 28 handover to an interim Iraqi government.

Iraq was a good thing--a noble mission--but poorly executed by an incompetent, cocky President who discarded caution because he wanted to prove he could do it better than Father--that he was more right than all those wimps who advised him against the undertaking.

In response to Hussein's aggression, Bush 41 sent 660,000 troops to the Persian Gulf in 1990; Rummy (who also had this thing to prove about the new agile, flexible, military) told Bush 43. we could do it with a fifth as many. And then you had a bunch of discredited neocons (rejected by Clinton) who, from the rarified atmosphere of think tanks, were stoking the President's vulnerabilities--chiefly a lack of common sense.