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The ammount of relevant information that is not in that wikpedia entry is staggering.

Regardless of the number of troops there several things that happened to create the problem that Rumsfeld had no control over.

First, there was an assumption that, like in Japan and Germany, there would remain a core of competent government officials that could continue the basic functions of government after the war. There was none. Both DOD and State, and everyone else thought this would be the case.

Second, the failure of the Turks to let us send the 4th ID in from the north caused a major change in the plan at the last minute. Instead of a classic “pincer” operation where we attack from north and south with additional troops, we had either wait two months for them to redeploy from the Med to the Gulf, or go with what we had in the gulf. The weather window dictated we not wait and do a Blitzkrieg from the south. This is a major point that everyone seems to forget.

Third, the “insurgency” was not home-grown. It was and still is mainly driven by “foreign” fighters being funneled in from Iran and Syria.

It was not believed by either DOD, or State, or anyone else, that Iran would make so large an effort to destablize.

Here, DOD’s hands are tied as to response. Even if you deployed every soldier in the US armed forces, you could not effectively close those borders AND conduct internal ops in Iraq and Afghanistan. We should have started taking out military targets in both those countries as a warning to them, and Rumsfeld might even have suggested that (we don’t know). But we did not for political reasons.

We could also go into all the pros and cons of what a larger force would have meant initially to the people of Iraq. Are we liberators or occupiers? Those decisions came from State based on political concerns. It was thought that it was better to stand up new Iraqi forces as quickly as possible...

20/20 hindsight is great. Unfortunately it is just that. It is always easy to nitpick after the fact.