Quote Originally Posted by tequila View Post
I'm not sure if the root is necessarily in American consensus politics. Foreign policy is generally made and executed in the executive branch, and certainly Iraq policy for the last four years has been the sole purview of this Administration until Democratic Party Congressional victories a few months ago.

The problem, I think, was that the post-invasion planning for Iraq was unrealistic, unresourced, and generally unserious. Plan A was halfass, and Plan B didn't even exist and was tossed together on the fly, without even a proper chain of command or communication between the civilian and military elements. Rather than dictating a course we ended up responding to events, and the end result has been chaos, waste, and the current wonderful situation we have now. What was always going to be very difficult ended up becoming much, much worse than if proper grownups had been in charge.
But the American tradition has always been that public and congressional opinion matters, even in national security. I think that is one of the defining features of our strategic culture, and one which leaves us ill equipped for ambiguous, protracted conflict. There may be a period of deference to the executive during a crisis, but it is always short lived. The Bush administration should have known in the summer of 2003 that it had about three years to make demonstrable progress or it would start losing public and congressional support. If it couldn't meet this timeline, it should have started looking for a way out at that point.

Of course, you're right about the failure of Phase IV planning. I was knocking around with the CFLCC Phase IV planning cell in April 2003 and saw it. But this is not unusual--states often don't anticipate or recognize insurgency until they have coalesced. Look at the British experience in Malaya or the French in Indochina or Algeria. The difference there, at least in the British case, was that their strategic culture gives much more deference to the government and entails a greater tolerance for protracted small wars.