I think the problem is that there's very little overlap people that accepted the bailout and people who are running the company today.
We like to think of corporate entities as these monolithic self-governing decision-making entities, but most likely it's some top executive's knee-jerk reaction to not meeting the 2012 goals that his bonus depended on.
It's fortunate that even with the short attention spans of today, the word "AIG" is now synonymous with "fuck up".
They should have waited another year or two.