I do not believe it is overrated. I was keeping very close tabs on what was happening in Iraq at this time. We attained a victory quickly with very few losses, and after the fighting had mostly ceased, the Former soldiers of Saddam were waiting to see what we would do.
What we did was to inform them that they were fired, we weren't going to give them any money, and they were sh*t out of luck as long as we were there. We compounded the problem by throwing all the Sunni's out of the government just because they had been members of the Bath party, (EVERYONE WAS A MEMBER OF THE BATH PARTY. YOU HAD TO BE.) and told them *they* were sh*t out of luck as long as we were there.
We then told them that their longstanding enemy, and the people whom they had been oppressing for generations, were now going to be in charge of *THEM* and that they could look forward to retaliatory payback from the Shias.
If I were an Iraqi solider, I would have set myself about the task of destroying us, and that is exactly what happened. Attacks started occurring all over Iraq. The Sunnis decided we needed to be killed in any manner possible, and so they set out to do it. Bear in mind, these were all the people who knew where the weapons and explosives were, and we deliberately made them into our enemy.
It was the most bone headed, brain dead, imbecilic idea that anyone could have come up with. In World War II, with the Nazis, who had caused us far more trouble and bloodshed, we didn't do anything so stupid.
We hanged the worst offenders, but we left the rest of them run things, and cautioned them to keep their noses clean.
We kicked a hornet's nest when all we needed to do is make an example out of Saddam and the worst offenders, set up a provisional government that included everyone, sit back and make sure it handled it's business, then get the h3ll out of there.
ISIS wouldn't have been created because the Iraqi Sunnis wouldn't have felt disenfranchised.
You corner a rat, and a rat's gonna fight. Bush and Bremer cornered the Sunnis, and I expected them to do no less than what they did. Anyone should have seen that coming.
Anyone.
Big Bump, we (Bush, Bremer) totally screwed up the occupation of Iraq,