Quote Originally Posted by Cavguy View Post
His main point is that none of the Iraq governance/occupation debacle should have been a mystery. We planned for 3 years prior to 1945 how we would govern Germany, and it paid off, with similar planning for Japan. If we had started with our 1945 governance regs/books we would have been better off.

He notes that before a country can be effectively occupied its will must be broken, and that our decisive/CoG effort against the Iraqi military failed to break the will of the population prior to occupation.
Certainly the planning for the governance and occupation of Iraq was woefully inadequate and based on some astonishingly inappropriate assumptions... but comparisons to Germany and Japan are unlikely to be useful. The same qualities that made Germany and Japan formidable opponents in war made them excellent candidates for organized reconstruction; likewise the same qualities that made Iraq such a failure at war made it an extremely poor candidate. The obvious difference - the extreme ethnic and sectarian divisions and the hostility produced by extended and brutal minority rule - is only the most obvious of many.

I suspect that failure to break the will of the population to resist our occupation was less an issue than our failure to accurately assess the will of the various sectors of the populace to kill each other.