Steve Clemons: Why after the Iraq military had been disbanded -- and it was made clear that this was not consistent with President's Bush's position -- that the military was not immediately reconstituted/reassembled? Is there some technical reason why after a military is officially disbanded that that order could not have been rescinded -- and then the Iraqi military reconstituted?

Paul Hughes: In a nutshell, Bremer was empowered to make the decision and it could have only been rescinded by him. The trick was how to make that happen.

Jay Garner tried to get him to roll it back some and Bremer refused; I suspect it would have taken Rumsfeld to make it happen and we know where he was on the issue.

The president was aware of the plans to use the military but he never had his hand on the throttle. So when the Pentagon leadership decided to abolish the military, it felt no need to inform either the President or the NSA (Rice). He was out of the loop on this decision because his management style enabled others to do end-runs around him.

Another aspect of this issue concerns how you put toothpaste back in the tube. Once the order was announced, there was no turning back because at that moment we stopped being an army of liberators and became an army of occupation. Once the Iraqis saw us in that light there was no way to go back and change that.