"Common sense would say the US is not going to invade another country and then have zero presence in that country after 2 months"
True. But they worked very hard at giving the impression that the time would be very short. When someone would raise the possibility that it would take hundreds of thousands of troops years or decades to stabilize the country, they were shouted down as being totally unrealistic. In fact one high ranking officer was pressured to resign after bringing the subject up. Yet here we are, starting year 3 with ~140k troops in country and little prospect of a significant draw down any time soon.
Something that may not be apparent to someone who isn't resident in this country is that the current Administration is very adept at fostering certain impressions while giving themselves plausible deniability if those impressions are questioned, not like our press would actually go to such extreme efforts. So, in this case, they talked about the brevity of the conflict, painted the picture of grateful Iraqis showering the troops with rose petals, denounced anyone who mentioned that there might be at least some Iraqis who wouldn't be pleased at being invaded, talked brightly about how Iraq would fund their own reconstruction with the oil revenues, talked about how the draw down would start within weeks of final combat, etc., etc. certainly gave the impression that we would only have a significant number of troops in country for only a few months, maybe a year.
Now true, they realized that reality was going to be different. IIRC, the original plan was to draw down to about 80k troops by the end of 2003. They had actually started the draw down, despite the all the signs of instability, and had to reverse those plans. They clearly were trying to ignore the instability in Iraq and for what ever reason didn't factor in the likelihood of the instability fueling the insurgency... |
