I didn't write it, but it looks like there were top people, including military people, saying they should plan for a strong resistance.
Do you have an article or document that contradicts this one? It would be good to compare them.
From the article:
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"Achieving the administration’s ambitions meant dealing with any turmoil that followed the collapse of Mr. Hussein’s government and his iron-fisted security services. Administration officials assumed that American and multinational troops would help stabilize Iraq, but they also believed that the newly liberated Iraqis would share the burden.
“The concept was that we would defeat the army, but the institutions would hold, everything from ministries to police forces,” Condoleezza Rice, the president’s national security adviser, said in an interview. “You would be able to bring new leadership but that we were going to keep the body in place.”
Early Warnings
Some military men, though, were worried that the administration would be caught short. Gen. Hugh Shelton, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first nine months of the Bush administration, was one of them.
General Shelton had contacts in the Middle East who had warned that Iraq could devolve into chaos after Mr. Hussein was deposed.
At a Pentagon meeting early in 2003 with former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, former vice chairmen and their successors, he voiced concerns that the United States would not have sufficient troops immediately after the dictator was ousted. He cautioned that it was important to have enough troops to deal with the unexpected. "
(snip)
Some high up military critters and many of the "Pentagon passed overs" are the biggest second guessers. Nobody really knew what was going to happen BEFORE we went in except that the Iraqi Army would be toast in short order, and that proved to be right.
"Top people [were] saying they should plan for a strong resistance."
My son served in Gulf War I with an elite unit and was there from August 1990 to April 1991. His unit entered Iraq 2 days before the "official" ground war start. Shortly before we invaded in 2003 I asked him how many troops he thought we should have. He said 450,000. Looks like he and the other pessimists were right. He had continued in the reserve, and then went back into active service. He is now in Afghanistan.
I recently made a FR post composed of some of his recent emails formatted as an "interview". It is titled "Front Line Views on Iraq/Afghanistan War Situation" 3/12/06, if you want to check it out. A lot of what he says concerns Afghanistan, not Iraq.