October 5, 2004 - "We paid a big price for not stopping it [looting in Baghdad] because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness, We never had enough troops on the ground." The speaker was not a candidate for office, at least not now. He was not a Democrat or even a Republican critic of the President’s Iraqi policy. It was President Bush’s handpicked viceroy in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer speaking to a convention of insurance agents in White Sulpher Springs, West Virginia. He believed that his remarks were “off the record” but the organization released a summary of his remarks to the press. It is not the first time that Bremer strayed from the Republican Campaign reservation. On September 17th he told an audience at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana that he should have been more insistent when Washington refused to listen to him. "The single most important change -- the one thing that would have improved the situation -- would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout", he said.

When his candid comments reached the public Bremer issued a CYA statement suggesting that his remarks related to the period when he took power in Baghdad but that the Administration’s plan to train Iraqi forces solved the problem and was going forward under the Interim Iraqi Government. Removing Saddam was, said Bremer, “the right thing to do.”

It may be a surprise to the families of hostages who came home with headless bodies and the families of the dead soldiers and marines that the problem was solved before Bremer handed over “sovereignty” to Ayud Allawi. It may even surprise those members of the Individual Ready Reserve who have been ordered to report for active duty. It must come as a great surprise to the Bush campaign that the administration’s man in Baghdad has admitted what was the self-evident flaw in the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld plan to fight a war in the cheap.

The Plan, the one that President Bush keeps telling us is working, called for a blitzkrieg to Baghdad followed by flowers and kisses. They expected the liberation of Paris. They got the quagmire of Saigon where the only blossoms in evidence are the fiery blooms from exploding bombs and the only flowers are strewn on newly made graves.

Bremer’s confessionals were not the only missteps in the Bush Administration’s best foot forward strategy. Even as the President is warning against what he calls “mixed messages” and Condoleezza Rice is running with that ball, Don Rumsfeld is making every effort to distance himself from the Administration’s leaky justification for the invasion.

With every new casualty, American or Iraqi, the failure of leadership that has plunged us into this swamp is more and more clear. Bremer’s remarks are not news. In late 2002 the warnings were there for anyone who would listen. The Pentagon and the Administration did not listen then and they are refusing to hear now. It is a case of too little and way too late.