The next day, a mild-mannered officer by the name of Ammar Hamed came to my hotel room. He had taken my democracy lessons to heart. He presented me with a proudly drafted petition, which he had titled "The Requests of Iraqi Military Forces," and which I have kept on my office wall to this day. In fractured English, 1st Lt. Hamed wrote:

"We can get the security where work in pairs (American troops) with Iraqi Army. We can bilt a new Iraqi Ministry of Defence ... We can make the Iraqi Army become a strong with the help of American Army, so Iraqi Army will interduce the good succeded and make security to still for a long time. Then lend with American troops the rest and help Iraqi police ...

"In the end, thank you, with best regards for the President and with all American troops ... and we are get back together the life and every thinks to best and make good."

Today it brings me enormous sorrow to recall that modest man's dreams for the future security of Iraq. Where is he now? Dead? Fighting for us? Fighting for them? All I know is, Azzawi, Hamed, Yassin and the other petitioners had little chance of getting their message across. A few days later, they marched the five miles from the officers club, across the Tigris River, to the gates of the Green Zone, hoisting signs that called on retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, then the U.S. administrator in Iraq, to meet with them, pay their salaries and endorse their plan to help America keep the peace. I marched with them, taking notes and pictures.

With a single gunshot, a U.S. soldier halted the 100-strong group outside the gates. A small delegation was invited to meet with Army Maj. Gen. Carl Strock, who told Azzawi and his followers through an interpreter, "We honor your service."

But given the arrival of L. Paul Bremer, Garner's replacement, the next day, these were empty words. There would be no jobs for them. My friend Azzawi met several more times with American officials, until it became clear they had no intention of even paying his taxi fare for helping to make connections among trustworthy members of the Iraqi police, his Iraqi army followers and the U.S. authorities. He took great risks to help America secure the peace and was kicked to the curb.

The men marched by the thousands in subsequent weeks, holding signs that read, "We Demand Our Rights" and "Please Keep Your Promises." After four months without pay, they were desperate to feed their families. On June 18 a stone-throwing riot erupted and U.S. military police killed two demonstrators. If America had any friends left among this group, I can't imagine they stayed friendly after that.

The Iraqis thought I'd come to the officers club on behalf of Garner, the first head of the occupation authority. Garner did indeed have a plan to hire and train mustered-out Iraqi troops; many months later I learned that a list of 300,000 names had been prepared. But at that very moment, unknown to me, Washington had decided to scrap the entire program. In a few days Garner would have his legs cut out from under him by the Bush administration; Bremer, committed to absolute "de-Baathification," was the president's new pick.

"Bremer just sort of arrived out of the blue," recalls Stephen Claypole, a former public affairs aide to Garner. "Jay was visibly shaken." He told me Garner was "second-guessed" and "micromanaged into oblivion by a ruthless, steely long finger from the Pentagon and Vice President Cheney's office."

As we now know, disbanding the Iraqi military, leaving 400,000 troops jobless and humiliated with ready access to their old weapons, was a huge blunder -- as was committing too few of our own forces in the first place (something even Bremer now acknowledges). Because Iraq had no secure borders, outside provocateurs could sow mayhem. Without an indigenous security force, the much-publicized big reconstruction projects couldn't proceed. Stoked by a lack of air conditioning, refrigeration and staples such as medicine and gasoline, the anger of average Iraqis soon would be boiling over. Throw in a nascent insurgency by both Sunnis and Shiites, and it is easy to understand how our great, optimistic enterprise in Iraq went awry.

Claypole, a Briton who advised both Garner and Major Gen. Tim Cross, the top British official in Baghdad, put it this way: "You would have to go several times around the world to find somebody more pro-American than me, but I still squirm with embarrassment and blush with shame when I think of the failure of the USA and my country to make proper preparations for the aftermath of the war in Iraq."

I left the country a year and a half ago, yet security is far worse now, and even electrical service remains spotty. Sewage still contaminates the drinking water in Baghdad. According to the reports of humanitarian organizations, chronic malnutrition affects some three out of 10 children in Iraq, particularly in the central and southern regions.

This cascade of failures was well hashed over in the presidential race. But few Americans realize how hungry, at one time, Iraqi military men were for direction of any kind. When I showed up in their midst a month after the Saddam statue fell, they started asking me -- the only American most had probably ever seen except in combat -- how they could get their message of cooperation to Garner.

During the Republican National Convention, I asked Bush-Cheney campaign chairman Marc Racicot whether postwar operations could have been better handled by our best and brightest -- specifically whether disbanding the Iraqi army was a mistake. "No," he said, staring at me with some annoyance, "I think they did an exceptionally good job." Predictably, he gave the president "excellent marks" for all phases of the war. Racicot did concede, however, that "there are always going to be unexpected consequences in any war."

But the urgent need to rebuild and reintegrate a defeated force is far from an "unexpected consequence." Winning the peace is well taught in our military war colleges. When I told Garner about Racicot's remarks, he immediately offered two words: "He's wrong."

With a tinge of anger in his voice, Garner went on: "There was a plan to bring back the Iraqi army. I briefed Condi [Rice] on it. I briefed the president. I briefed [Paul] Wolfowitz. Everyone agreed on it. We had budgeted to pay the Iraqi army; Carl Strock had rounded up the Iraqi army to pay them. We had also lined up training for the regular Iraqi army." A Virginia-based defense contractor that had retrained the Croatian army after the Bosnian war was all set to do a similar job in Iraq.

What happened? Even now, Garner doesn't seem entirely sure, or won't say. He says he was never told why he fell from favor. "A lot of stuff in that Pentagon operation is clandestine," he said, referring to the machinations of the civilian leadership that prosecuted the war. "And the vice president's office is a shadowy organization."

Clearly, whatever enthusiasm Garner once had for the Bush administration is long gone. I didn't tell him my own story: how I was mistaken for his emissary those many months ago. I didn't have the heart. Because, think about it: If a middle-aged, unarmed journalist who never served a day in uniform could have commanded the Iraqi army after the fall of Saddam, just imagine what might have happened if we'd only done one or two things right.

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