July 2003. Baghdad had fallen three months earlier. At an economic forum in Jordan, King Abdullah II pulled aside L. Paul Bremer III — the American diplomat running Iraq’s provisional government — and asked him to reconsider two decisions: disbanding the Iraqi army, and blacklisting members of Saddam’s Baath Party.
The king’s warning, in his own account, was that the decisions “would blow up in all of our faces.”
“I said I hoped he understood that if he was going to de-Baathify across the board, he would be setting himself up for major resistance across the board, and would create a power vacuum that someone would have to fill.”
On disbanding the army, Abdullah was blunter: it was “crazy… a recipe for anarchy and chaos.”
Bremer’s reply, as the king recalled it:
“I know what I’m doing. There’s going to be some kind of compensation. I’ve got it all in hand, thank you very much.”
The power vacuum was filled. A Jordanian named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had already entered Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq before the invasion; the post-invasion vacuum allowed his existing network to expand into the organization that became the Islamic State. → Islamic State (ISIS) A senior CIA officer, Rob Richer, later described the conditions with an agricultural metaphor:
“The fertile soil was Iraq after de-Baathification. The rain and sunshine were the ineptitude of the provisional authority and U.S. misunderstanding of Iraqis and their culture. All of that allowed Zarqawi to blossom and grow.”
The CIA’s Baghdad station chief, Gerry Meyer, filed two reports warning of the growing insurgency. Within weeks of the second, he was relieved of command and ordered back to Washington.
Source: Joby Warrick, Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS — in-vault full text. Abdullah’s account is from his 2011 memoir, quoted by Warrick.
What it argues
Breaking a regime and building a state are different problems, and the second one is where everything fails. This is the strongest available version of that claim because it isn’t hindsight — the warning was delivered, specifically, in advance, by someone with regional expertise, and dismissed in one sentence.
The line that does the work is “I know what I’m doing.” It’s what confident competence sounds like from the inside, which is exactly the problem: every catastrophic intervention was run by people who believed that sentence when they said it.
Use it against: “we’d do it better next time,” and the Powell-doctrine objection that the criteria never bind. → Foreign Policy - Position Card, support #1.