Not to defend Rumsfeld or Wolfewitz, but I thought I'd mention a little political history of nearly a decade with Iraq.

for instance, post Desert Storm, we had incited the Shi'ites to rise up against Saddam. Whether through real or implied promises of assistance, the Shi'ites took it to mean we would support them. Our coalition partners of the time resisted an expansion of the mission beyond the ejection of iraqi forces from Kuwait. Our own politicians believed they could not get support for the mission at home and were concerned about the number casualties we might take. JCoS Powell's own doctrine rejected it, even as we had over 400k troops on the boarder. In the end, our lack of response turned into the Shi'ite "bay of pigs". It took months to get approval to do fly overs and ground Saddam's airborne forces. Even then, it wasn't enough to keep the genocidal massacres from happening. (which, of course, is one of the reasons that many Shi'ite were less than friendly to us, unwilling to give us time to resolve their issues and suspicious that we were complicit with the Sunni/al Qaida mass murders of Shi'ite).

in 1993, after Desert Storm and into the sanctions, national and international opinion was castigating the effects of the war, various tomahawk strikes and sanctions on the Iraqi people. This same issue continued over several years with politicians of all levels and nations continually insisting that there was nothing but great sorrow for the plight of the Iraqis. They consistently called for Saddam to comply with sanctions and inspection regime in order to lessen the plight of his people. While, at the same time, international opinion was painting the US now as the great aggressor against an innocent and defenseless people.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton signs the Iraq Liberation Act. its premise states that the Iraqis are oppressed by Saddam's regime and the US would act to depose the regime and "free" the Iraqis.

From that point on, all language consistently labels Saddam as an illegitimate ruler, his regime as oppressive and the Iraqi people as the victim of this terrible government. Not forgetting, of course, our European allies who were reluctant to act against Saddam or accept our action with an overwhelming public outcry against the human fallout of the sanctions. Not forgetting, either, that our ME friends were reluctant to have war simply declared on Iraq without a cause they could sell their own people. That cause being heavily reliant upon the terrible acts of the Iraqi army in Kuwait and the long term selling of Saddam as the oppressor and aggressor.

My point being that, in our discussions about troop numbers, force projection and over all lack of destruction on initial invasion cannot be viewed through some simple disagreement between the military and civilian leadership at the time as the best way to conduct war, some desire to do "war on the cheap" or misconstruing the intent of the Iraq army to "flip" or stay in place.

Clausewitz, war as the continuation of politics. Based on over a decade of watching our political and military dealings with Iraq as well as the reaction to even the strictest targeting, I believe we had painted ourselves into a political corner than insisted we approach Iraq as a "liberation", reducing all possible collateral damage to about nil and acting largely to protect the Iraqi people and the Iraqi nation, even from our own forces.

In fact, our naming the operation "Iraqi Freedom" was not simply a consequence of our shaping the battle space in 2003 in an attempt to reduce iraqi resistance or insure the cooperation of local governments or the assistance of coalition partners. It was also a consequence of a decade of national and international politics, including the "iraq liberation act".

In the end, I believe this had a significant impact on how we presented and organized our attack with limited forces with the intent of limited destruction and limited casualties. you can't simply pretend that those years did not exist or that we could suddenly turn around a decade of painting the Iraqis as "victims" and now make the entire nation complicit in Saddam's acts and targetable.