Bush the Elder chose foreign policy realists as advisors, Brent Scrowcroft being a prime example. Scrowcroft was a leading critic of Dubya’s plan for invading Iraq.
In WWII we had an entire Army division that did nothing other than reestablish civil government as our front lines passed through. The Dubya and Rumsfeld geniuses thought that they knew better and so disposed of that entirely, guaranteeing that there would be chaos behind the front line. Which of course there was.
But even if we had used a civil affairs division we wouldn’t have known how to deal with the intractable Sunni-Shia split among the population. Of course among Dubya’s neocons such concerns were inconsequential- it was only in the real world that such things matter.
>>In WWII we had an entire Army division that did nothing other than reestablish civil government as our front lines passed through. The Dubya and Rumsfeld geniuses thought that they knew better and so disposed of that entirely, guaranteeing that there would be chaos behind the front line. Which of course there was.
In WWII we had military proconsuls like Lucius Clay and Douglas MacArthur running things in the defeated countries, men with some sense who understood the military and what a militarily-defeated country looked like. Post Saddam, Dubya had Paul Bremer, a clueless striped-pants State Department type. This very poor decision by Dubya did not help our cause.