The dramatic contrast between expectations and reality in the Iraq war has sparked a wide-ranging debate over "what went wrong." According to many critics, civilian planners made a series of critical mistakes that have turned what might have been a successful war and occupation into a fiasco. The most common critique takes roughly the following form: * Though the war plan to topple Saddam was brilliant, planning for the peace was woefully insufficient. * The United States did not have a sufficient number of troops to restore order in Iraq after the U.S. invasion and also failed to develop a plan to stop the widespread looting that occurred in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad. * The administration erred in disbanding the Iraq army, which might have played a valuable role in restoring security to the country. * The United States erred further in its harsh decrees proscribing members of the Ba'ath party from participation in Iraq's public life-a decision, like that which disbanded the army, needlessly antagonizing the Sunnis and pushing many of them into the insurgency. * The Bush administration needlessly antagonized the international community-including both the United Nations and our European allies-and made it much more difficult to obtain help for the occupation and reconstruction of the country. * The Bush administration was too slow in making funds available for reconstruction and created a labyrinth bureaucracy for the awarding of contracts. These revisions, the authors argue, are themselves in need of revising. Though the critics have made a number of telling points against the conduct of the war and the occupation, the basic problems faced by the United States flowed from the enterprise itself, and not primarily from mistakes in execution along the way. The most serious problems facing Iraq and its American occupiers- "endemic violence, a shattered state, a nonfunctioning economy, and a decimated society"-were virtually inevitable consequences that flowed from the breakage of the Iraqi state. The critique stressing the insufficient number of forces employed in the invasion, though valid abstractly, exaggerates the number and type of forces actually available for the conduct of the war. Once account is taken of the exigencies of a multi-year campaign, the stresses on active and reserve forces created by maintaining troops in the 108,000 to 150,000 range, and the unrealism of assuming significant allied contributions (given the opposition of public opinion to the war in most allied states), it would have been impossible to generate force levels in the 300,000 to 400,000 range called for by many critics. Plans for "Phase 4" operations, which were given little attention before the war, failed to anticipate the most serious problems facing U.S. forces after the fall of Baghdad-persistent anarchy and the emergence of a raging insurgency. This was a mistake, as critics point out, but it is very doubtful that U.S. forces could have gotten a handle on the problem even had these contingencies received the planning they deserved.