http://www.myhowtoos.com/en/red-hot/86-all-costs-of-war-in-iraq-for-usa

Installing an interim government in a place that's been a one-party state since the 1960's (?) is not exactly a quick and easy thing.

"Given that the democracy happy talk turned out to be an actual political objective rather than the standard hyperbole used when rallying a democracy to fight, that's sort of where I thought we should have gone. "

Wrong - an actual Iraqi democracy was plan D. Plan A was to install Chalabi and his couple o' hundred guys; this melted like an ice cube in a blast furnace. Plan B was to directly run Iraq as a military dictatorship. This didn't work so well; we had none of the will, force or competancy to do so.

Plan C was to find out just how many Shiites Sistani could put into the streets, and to find out just how hard it'd be to fight both the Shiites (~60% of Iraq) *and* the Sunni Arabs (~20%).

At that point, the US government wisely chose Plan D - work with the Shiite militia groups which didn't mind working with us (of course, they didn't mind working with us only so long as they needed us).

"Most of the anti-war arguments had to do with the optionality of invasion rather than the prospect of setting off turmoil in Iraq. To the extent heavy casualties were predicted, it was based on an overestimation of the staunchness of the resistance to invading Baghdad and toppling Saddam."

As has been pointed out above, the actual expert opinion was that we were talking a few to several hundred thousand soldiers, for years. Which was both an anti-(it'll be quick, cheap and easy!) war opinion, and one that you really should have paid attention to, IMHO.

[Source: Outside The Beltway | OTB] quoted: With the exception of a very few people who deeply understood the social/political/historical situation in Iraq and the surrounding countries in the region(who were to a person dismissed as liberal/peace...

I thought we'd go in big, crush resistance, buy those who could be bought, write a constitution and ram it down the Iraqis throats, spend some money building institutions and infrastructure, then babysit them for 10 years while they adjusted.

It never occurred to me that the president was dumb enough to think this was a quick smash-n-run job. It never occurred to me we'd dither around without enough troops to maintain order, allow a counter-insurgency to grow, and insist on letting the Iraqis invent their own "democracy."

Given that the democracy happy talk turned out to be an actual political objective rather than the standard hyperbole used when rallying a democracy to fight, that's sort of where I thought we should have gone.

You can smash and run if your objective is merely regime change and sending a message that you'd better behave or this will happen to you. Using that approach, you get rid of the worst of the worst and leave the native grown-ups who know what they're doing in charge. That means no de-Baathification and leaving all but Saddam's top cronies in place.

The military as a conversion tool for society model is not one I think useful. If that's your mission though, you've got to then set up an army of occupation. You can run a benevolent government and give the locals as much dignity as possible -- still keeping the bureaucrats, military, and police rank-and-file in place and drawing a paycheck -- but you're running the show.

We wound up with the worst of both worlds: A too ambitious mission, a too-small force, and pretending that the Iraqis were "sovereign" when they weren't.

that we would topple Saddam Hussein’s government, install an interim government, and elect a permanent government within some short period.

I am short of time just now (and have not read all the comments), but did this strike anyone else as rather...

Condescendingly "colonial"?

And for the record... I thought we would do the same by now, just at a much higher cost than we have paid so far.

Hubris...

Steve

You know, my first indication we weren't going that way was when I realized commanders were basically fighting a war of maneuver.

I assumed we'd be bombing enemy troop concentrations, not cutting them off then letting them melt into the alleyways.

It's when I first got this tingling on the back of the neck that this was going to be screwed up. And then when we admitted we didn't have the troops to stop looting? And couldn't even protect major oil facilities? You could feel the power vacuum.

Just because we have now mastered the art of using a scalpel instead of the sledgehammer we used to win WW2 that doesn't mean the scalpel is necessarily the best tool in the kit. We'd have saved more American (and Iraqi civilian) lives if we'd taken more Iraqi army lives.

Occupations 101: Place boot firmly on neck.

I thought we were doing Japan 1945.

Nah. To do that we'd've needed to defeat the people rather than just defeating the government. We killed something like 4% of the Japanese population.

I thought we'd go in big, crush resistance, buy those who could be bought, write a constitution and ram it down the Iraqis throats, spend some money building institutions and infrastructure, then babysit them for 10 years while they adjusted.

It never occurred to me that the president was dumb enough to think this was a quick smash-n-run job. It never occurred to me we'd dither around without enough troops to maintain order, allow a counter-insurgency to grow, and insist on letting the Iraqis invent their own "democracy."

I underestimated Mr. Bush's stupidity. Oh, I knew he was stupid. Didn't know he was that stupid.

Failing to provide adequate security for Iraqis and their important sites was also key. When Zinni war gamed this, he estimated a need of about 300k troops. I would love to know why they rejected his results. Do we need McMaster to explain this?

Steve

Do you believe that we didn't exit Iraq as quickly as many expected because of poor predictions on what the aftermath of the invasion would be, or because the invasion was executed poorly?

If the former, were accurate predictions possible but bungled, or was the Bush Administration legitimately surprised by how it worked out? If the latter, what were the shortcomings in its execution?

and

What interim government was there to be installed? My sense was that everyone who might have led such a government inside the country had been killed, and that the exiles were deeply untrustworthy, and (more to the point) that the level of their popular support in Iraq was totally unknown, and quite possibly zero.

And that leaves creation of a government ex nihilo as the only remaining possibility. It was certainly (I thought) a possibility that had to be taken seriously, if the exiles didn't work out, as seemed likely.

In hindsight, I'm not sure what I thought. Probably, I just figured that the war planners had already prepared for the contingency. Probably, Chalabi and his boys.

Basically, you put an Iraqi face in charge, announce that there will be elections is some short, specified point in the future, and provide security assistance in the interim.

We botched a number of things, notably 1) failing to pay off the existing army and police forces, 2) ridding the government of competent bureaucrats through de-Baathification, and 3) inexplicably failing to secure the oil fields and weapons stockpiles. How things would have gone differently had we not made those obvious mistakes, I dunno. But we might well have avoided the massive insurgent violence.