Doomed
By Meanwhile, you need to put Iraq in strategic context. The goal wasn’t merely to topple Saddam, but to intimidate other “rogue” regimes by creating a credible threat to take them out too. That meant that something like a 350,000 troop, 15-year commitment wouldn’t achieve the goals of the policy. It wasn’t “incompetent” for Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld to have rejected those methods; the rejection followed directly from what they were trying to accomplish.
And this is why the strategy (especially beloved by liberal hawks) of claiming that this was “really” a war about liberating the Iraqi people and not about the Grave Threat posed by Saddam’s Model Planes Of Terrah has always been a non-starter, because the former war simply wasn’t on the table and never was. The former would have been a bad idea too, because we know nothing about how to create a stable democracy ex nihilo in an institutional context as unfavorable as Iraq, but it’s beside the point because it was simply never an option. Defenders of the war were defending Bush’s war being run by people appointed by George Bush for strategic reasons valued by Bush and Cheney, period.