Also on another note, I would propose that it was not Tommy Franks who turned away from defeating the Republican Guard in detail.
I believe that Schwarzkopf had responsibility in issuing countermanding orders, and it was Powell (and/or higher) who flinched at the actual slaughter.
I believe this strongly, having served in that war, and having some insight from there. It was a point for some argument afterward. When the dust settled, Franks was promoted and Schwarzkopf retired.
These are executive decisions. The buck stops at the White House. in 1991, the right thing to do was to stop the killing, if the decision was to leave Saddam in power. What truly screwed things up was Bush giving the Shiites cause to believe that the US would intervene on their side, thereby resulting in a revolt that was crushed with great slaughter by Saddam. That was probably a factor in Shiite distrust and resentment of the US occupation during the Operation Enduring Freedom, a sentiment that manifested itself in the decision to evict US troops.
I'm not blaming Franks for not slaughtering Saddam's army in 2003 - I'm blaming Bush. Again, how many of the enemy to kill is ultimately an executive decision, because of the foreign relations and international law aspects of the decision.
After 9/11, the right thing to do was to ask Congress for 20 additional army divisions, in preparation for occupation duty and future military operations. Instead, he did a tax cut and asked people to go shopping.
I thought then that this administration was either awfully confident or awfully wrong about the outcome of future military operations. I had expected, at minimum, an expansion of ground forces or even a limited draft for occupation duty. Political capital has a limited shelf life. If you don't seize the moment, that moment is lost forever.
We garrisoned postwar Japan with 350K troops for 5 years. This was a country that lost 4% of its population including perhaps 1/3 of its 18-28 fighting age men. It was also a country that had been near starvation for years, and had suffered 500K civilian deaths through firebombings and nuclear strikes. And Japan is an island nation, whose waters were extensively patrolled by the US Navy, apart from which no neighbor (all of which had suffered from Japanese attacks) was likely to want to help the Japanese fight the US. On top of it all, Japan's God Emperor, Hirohito had, in exchange for immunity from prosecution, told his people to surrender and stop fighting. As a living god, the odds were good that his orders would be followed.
Nonetheless, 350K occupation troops were allocated for a beaten nation that would have seen millions of famine deaths if not for the end of the war. And Bush thought 140K occupation troops would be enough for Iraq, whose fighting age Sunni Arab troop numbers had barely been grazed.
You might say this is Monday morning quarterbacking. My response? I'm just a keyboard jockey doing this analysis for fun. If I were the decisionmaker, on the basis of my resources and my time (a few hours a week), I'd cut myself some slack.
Bush had an army of millions in the Federal bureaucracy working for him, and thousands of analysts whose job was ultimately to answer any questions he cared to ask. All he had to do was formulate those questions, or appoint people to do it for him. He had no excuse for dropping the ball. If we had 350K troops in Iraq (or Afghanistan), we would have suffered fewer combat deaths. Instead, Rumsfeld went with the nutty notion that penny packet deployments necessitated by a small occupation force would lead to fewer casualties (his "more troops = more casualties" assertion).
My view is that Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney had too much business experience. They ran the war like an established profitable business, trying to squeeze out efficiencies. Except the ultimate success of the enterprise was in doubt from the beginning, not because the US lacked resources, but because it lacked the popular support to lose thousands of men for complete strangers in a country with an alien, hostile and, frankly, barbaric culture. The time to ask for the manpower and money necessary for victory was right after 9/11. Bush dropped the ball then, and then divided up the limited US forces available for an invasion of Iraq. This is the definition of incompetence. Instead of overkill (500K troops for 5 years or so), they placed 140K troops there and suffered 4K dead at the end of Bush's 2nd term, thereby paving the way for an Obama victory in 2008.
Note that I’m not suggesting that historically, it has been impossible to subdue a conquered population with small numbers of garrison troops. Mongols placed tiny garrisons in the towns and cities they conquered before moving on to the next objective. And much of the time, this worked well. Mainly because any locale that killed the garrison was exterminated to the last man, woman and child, once the Mongols found out about it. Bush obviously did not have that option in Iraq.
What was even funnier was that Bush claimed he had enough troops in Iraq, but somehow, more troops (i.e. “The Surge”) seemed to help turn the tide. If he had placed 200K additional troops there from the beginning instead of the piddling 30K during “The Surge”, would he have had to account for 4K dead GI’s when he left office?
I trusted Bush’s judgment at the time Shinseki made his 500K man occupation force recommendation and, along with the rest of the GOP choir, dismissed Shinseki’s view as the politically-motivated words of a man appointed to his position by Clinton. Now it’s obvious he was doing Bush a favor. It’s not that Bush was never told - he just chose to ignore the advice.
Yet another mis-statement. The Mongols weren't Nazis. Their chief concern was armed revolt, not the preservation/purification of some mythical race. Anyone, of any race or ethnicity, who joined the tribe and pledged fealty to the khan became a Mongol. The female captives were distributed to the troops, either as wives, concubines or servants. Any male captive taller than the axle of a wagon wheel was executed.