Pres. Bush has been accused of lying by a former loyal Bushie — Paul Bremmer, Bush’s viceroy in Iraq at the beginning of the U.S. occupation in 2003. The issue in dispute is who made the disastrous decision to disband the Iraqi Army after the American invasion. In “Dead Certain,” the new book on the Bush presidency by Robert Draper, Bush denies responsibility and blames Bremmer for disbanding the Iraqi military:

“The policy was to keep the army intact; didn’t happen,” Bush told biographer Robert Draper in excerpts published in Sunday’s New York Times.

Draper pressed Bush to explain why, if he wanted to maintain the army, his chief administrator for Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, issued an order in May 2003 disbanding the 400,000-strong army without pay.

“Yeah, I can’t remember; I’m sure I said, ‘This is the policy, what happened?’ ” Bush said, adding: “Again, Hadley’s got notes on all this stuff” — a reference to national security advisor Stephen J. Hadley.

Hadley may have notes but so does Bremmer. He has denied the president’s accusation in a column in the New York Times:

It has become conventional wisdom that the decision to disband Saddam Hussein’s army was a mistake, was contrary to American prewar planning and was a decision I made on my own. In fact the policy was carefully considered by top civilian and military members of the American government. And it was the right decision.

And:

On May 22, I sent to President Bush, through Secretary Rumsfeld, my first report since arriving in Iraq. I reviewed our activities since arrival, including our de-Baathification policy. I then alerted the president that “I will parallel this step with an even more robust measure dissolving Saddam’s military and intelligence structures.” The same day, I briefed the president on the plan via secure video. The president sent me a note on May 23 in which he thanked me for my report and noted that “you have my full support and confidence.”

The decision not to recall Saddam Hussein’s army was thoroughly considered by top officials in the American government. At the time, this decision was not controversial.

In 2003, Amb. Joe Wilson wrote a column for the New York Times that disputed Pres. Bush’s assertion in his State of the Union address that Saddam Hussein was shopping for uranium in Niger. In retaliation, Vice Pres. Cheney engineered a scheme to trash Wilson by exposing his wife’s identity as a secret operative and specialist in weapons of mass destruction working for the CIA’s counter-proliferation division.

It will be interesting to see what Cheney has in store for Paul Bremmer, and whether a former loyal Bushie will get the same rough treatment as others who call this president out on his lies.