The dims, like kerry, did everything in their power to make President Bush look bad and it was chiefly for their political gain. It got us obummer as an added bonus.
And Bush went to war with a military that had been thoroughly purged of experienced and capable officers by Clinton. After the initial walkover we didn’t do very well until the capable juniors percolated up through the ranks and gravitated toward battlefield command due to their talent. That’s what got us over the hump, not the surge, though that came at the right time and certainly helped. The surge would probably have availed us little had it been done much earlier.
Actually, the reason the “Iraq war” cost so much was it was really two wars — the war we went to fight, to topple the Ba’athist government that was flouting the terms of the Gulf War armistice agreement (which incidentally went just as predicted by Rumsfeld’s school which advocated the sufficiency of a light highly mobile force with complete air superiority and justified the media-vilified “Mission Accomplished” banner) and the war we got stuck fighting because no one in Washington understood we were ripping the sticking plaster off the Sunni-Shi’ite fault line and as a result didn’t send the right kind of force to fight until “the Surge” just before Obama threw away the victories in both.