I agree with him that we shouldn’t be nation building and with you that the post war military effort has been lacking until very recently but some progress is beginning to take shape.
You’re right in that we have to win this and that we should have gone into this with a total war mentality.
In actuality, installing “experts” rather than a democracy was precisely what the United States did at the behest of the State Department, in the form of L. Paul Bremer and Lakhdar Brahimi. The State Department’s hatred of Iraqi dissidents and exiles such as Chalabi prevented Iraqis (aside from the limited circumstances mainly involving the Kurds) being allowed to participate in their own liberation. Allawi’s book is very good on these points. The fact that Afghanistan was allowed to have its own government sooner is one reason, it seem to me, why it has, as Karzai has said, been able to do more than Iraq with less aid.
As Sowell himself has written, few things are all good or all bad; there are trade-offs to virtually any endeavor undertaken on Earth rather than in Heaven.
Technocracy-— rule by experts-— has, as democracy does, both strengths and weaknesses for nations that have no experience in it and nations that have had it over 200 years. The weakness of technocracy is that if you have the wrong experts, it doesn’t work. The Democrats and the State Department and perhaps the CIA applied their influence and managed to remove Jay Garner, who had been successful in the North previously, and who had wanted to follow the Afghanistan model, with L. Paul Bremer, who had no experience in the region, much less a similar record of success in it to speak of.