[Valin]

but one mistake was HUGE. Dissolving of Iraqi army and ruling party

As far as I can tell, by the time we got to Baghdad there was no Iraqi army to keep. They just went home, except for those that became the "insurgency".

The key illusion was that Iraq is a blank page on which the perfect new society

Now there you could make an argument, that we were operating from ignorance.

[A. Pole]

As far as I can tell, by the time we got to Baghdad there was no Iraqi army to keep. They just went home, except for those that became the "insurgency".

You take it out of thin air: "As far as I can tell".

Why would they? They wanted to keep their jobs and many hoped for reward for not defending the regime.

"[...]Before the war, President Bush approved a plan that would have put several hundred thousand Iraqi soldiers on the U.S. payroll and kept them available to provide security, repair roads and prepare for unforeseen postwar tasks. But that project was stopped abruptly in late May by L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, who ordered the demobilization of Iraq's entire army, including largely apolitical conscripts [...]"

(Wrong Turn at a Postwar Crossroads?)