[WOSG]

Overall agree, but ... “There were no really super bad judgments” ... there was one: The decision to disband the Army by Paul Bremer in May 2003 was in retrospect a fatal blunder.

The phrase, keep your friends close and your enemies closer, comes to mind. The disbanded army was unemployed and looking for a way to restore pride. Had we instead kept and reformulated it, we would have been 2-3 years sooner with Iraqi security forces, and the core of the insurgency would not have the expertise they had. Many of those former insurgent Sunni baathists are now back on ‘our’ side, fighting Al Qaeda. Had they been with us the whole time, we’d have cut years off the fighting.

Long term, yes, the key strategic victory is being won, and the US was flexible enough in strategy to get there.

[bvw]

I understand that thinking, and as far as might be done on a "what if" basis, I disagree with the premise that it would have been a war-shortening thing to have bought the Iraqi Army, instead of disbanding it. Why? (1) Because more things were considered through the high diopter lens of near-chaos and insurrection. By the Iraqis, by us and our allies. Those lessons of what happens without an effective police and government among a population at violent odds among itself are worth the tragedies, sufferings and pain, long term. (2) That bought Army would have itself been unstable and caused great trouble in ways we can only now imagine.

What we have now with them is not perfect by far, but I suspect that relationships man to man at every level are stronger for having been tested and proven. That's a foundation for building.

A bought army is no foundation for anything but trouble.