A Brief History of the Iraq War: Gains, Defeats and Miscalculation

Three days into the war, several retired Gulf War generals warned that coalition troop levels were too low to seize and hold Iraq. Barry McCaffrey, who had commanded the 24th Infantry Division in the Gulf War, said taking Baghdad “is going to be brutal, dangerous work and we could take, bluntly, a couple to 3,000 casualties.” His comments were dismissed at the time. “I can’t manage what people -- civilians or retired military -- want to say,” then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in response. “And if they go on and say it enough, people will begin to believe it.” And strictly speaking, McCaffrey was wrong: Baghdad fell easily on April 9. But what neither Rumsfeld nor McCaffery had taken into account was the possibility of a guerilla war, which would cost American troops well in excess of the casualties McCaffrey was warning about. The State Department had provided the Bush administration with a comprehensive post-invasion plan to administer Iraq. Bush ignored it, preferring instead to run the war through hand-picked political loyalists who, in turn, let nepotism and politics dictate the hiring and firing of non-military occupation personnel. Many were literally vetted for their political allegiance to Bush and compliance to Republican Party ideology that had nothing to do with running Iraq (such as whether they were for or against abortion rights).