Paul Krugman writes in his latest column,

[The Bush administration has committed] a chain of blunders: doing nothing to stop the postwar looting, disbanding the Iraqi Army...

It is interesting to me that disbanding the Iraqi army is cited a mistake by Mr. Krugman without any further comment -- the sort of thing that would be obvious to any casual observer. And it very well may have been a mistake. But something tells me that had the Bush administration chosen to use the Iraqi army to keep the peace, it would have been assaulted with mountains of the criticism from the left charging that this sort of thing is morally reprehensible. Had it hapenned, I bet Krugman himself would have written a few columns describing the moral bankrupcy of Bush's foreign policy.

Hindsight is 20/20. Given the situation in Iraq now, its easy to cite the disbanding of the Iraqi army as a blunder committed by an incompetent administration. Yet it was a bold and courageous decision at the time: the United States refused to be associated with the previous Baathist regime by using its law enforcement tools, even if it meant sending thousands of disgruntled, unemployed soldiers into the streets.