Why mealy mouth it? It was a very bad move. The army needed to be kept very carefully together. Keep your bad apples in one basket, and keep a good eye on the basket is very elementary tactics. The situation was not the same as in Germany. Look at it from the point of view of the guys who got demobilized; there was not a wealth of economic opportunity in a crushed economy. The disaffection was huge.
Disbanding the army was like throwing gasoline on a fire. If you don’t do that, of course you still have a problem of safely disposing of an explosive. But this is typically less wearing than living through an explosion.
As for working with an intact army, that the army was largely Ba’athist wasn’t as much of the problem as that it was mainly Sunni. As Iraq tries to decide if it is one state or three especially, it would take a lot of working with. In Germany nearly everybody was a Nazi, but at the end of the war that wasn’t such a big problem as it might have sounded like. Of course, we weren’t trying to occupy Germany on a shoestring. Anyhow, you can relatively easily sanitize an officer corps, but it is harder to add Shia and Kurds to the mix. We would still be stuck with considerable force building. But we would have had a better chance to do that force building.
As for whatever good will was gotten from whatever quarter by disbanding the army, I don’t see much of it left.
