There were no clear lines of authority, furthermore. Who was in charge in Baghdad: Sanchez or the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer? Not only did Bush and Rumsfeld choose military leaders lacking in intellectual distinction, they concocted a system of multiple chains of command, again, in the service of perhaps the worst possible result. Sanchez was followed by Army Gen. George Casey, a fundamentally average intellect immersed in a foreign culture of which he understood not nearly enough. The story of how Army Gen. David Petraeus replaced Casey in early 2007 and partly turned the tide of the war through the intelligent application of a counterinsurgency strategy is well known. But ask yourself: What if Bush and Rumsfeld (along with Cheney), once having decided to invade Iraq, then vowed from the beginning to work only with the most far-sighted commanders that the armed services could offer -- men of the Zinni-Petraeus caliber? What if they always demanded exceptional intelligence and independence at the top of the command structure? Anyone who says that would not have mattered would be a rank determinist.
Better generalship and logical command chains would likely have improved the security situation, leading to less financial cost, less loss of human life, less opportunity for Iranian meddling, and thus a better geopolitical outcome. The Bush administration may have failed less because it chose to go to war than because of the manner in which it did so.
Of course, the very indifference in which the White House and the Pentagon chose generals was indicative of something much deeper -- for the failure to competently prosecute a war and occupation was inherent in the very hubris of the conception. In other words, the arrogance of thinking that you could invade and make over a complex society like Iraq's -- something to which admittedly I and many others subscribed, or at least partly subscribed -- led, in the case of top administration officials, to assume the task would be straightforward enough for a Franks or a Sanchez to manage.
Lesson: The greater the geopolitical risk one takes, the more expert must be the execution of the enterprise! Iraq may not in any case have been winnable, but it need not have turned out to be quite the disaster it was. This is especially the case when one considers that the administration's deeper motives for invading Iraq -- unconnected to the mere official one of finding weapons of mass destruction or the philosophical one of spreading democracy -- had to do with providing a demonstration of naked American power in the aftermath of 9/11 for Arabs to take note of. But this backfired precisely because the military-civilian execution of the post-invasion phase was so wanting.
Nevertheless, I have merely indicated what might have been, not what was. At the end of the day, we who supported the war (with all of our caveats) are left with the facts that we have: in this case indicating that the war was a failure. Counterfactuals, as I have written before, are interesting for the analyst, but not for the families of the dead. They have only the facts as they are.
As for the Bush administration, the record is deeply contradictory. Bush's first six years of decision-making in Iraq make him arguably the worst American president in decades. But his last two years, after Cheney lost influence and after Rumsfeld was replaced at the Pentagon by Robert Gates -- with Petraeus replacing Casey in Iraq -- arguably ranks as one of the bravest presidential records in foreign policy in decades. Bush went against both Republicans and Democrats, and against public opinion at large, by actually increasing the number of troops in Iraq in 2006-2007. The result was a dramatic drop in Iraqi casualties. That was by any measure a profile in courage. Too bad Bush's critical thinking early in his presidency was not equal to the courage he demonstrated toward the end of it.
