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"They planned to pull the troops out quickly," said Anthony Cordesman, a defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. That plan was based on what Cordesman called an illogical assumption that U.S. forces would be greeted almost universally as liberators, that political control could be handed over to Iraqis quickly and that there would be no insurgency.
"We never really had a nation-building plan," Cordesman said.
Pentagon planners did foresee some postwar difficulties. They were prepared, for example, to deal with a refugee problem, with acute hunger, with a torching of oil fields or with an explosion of ethnic violence — none of which happened.
What they did not fully foresee was the violence aimed at U.S. occupation troops and the other security problems that have hampered the reconstruction efforts and angered many Iraqis.
An early indication that the administration did not foresee a long and violent postwar period was a statement made by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Feb. 27, shortly before the war began.
They really did think they'd just install King Chalabi I, and he'd be showered with rose petals as he sold off the oil fields.