All Intensive Purposes

The Army's official historian says we lost control of the situation in Iraq two or three months after the invasion, at which point initiative passed to the insurgents. "U.S. war planners, practitioners and the civilian leadership conceived of the war far too narrowly.... This overly simplistic conception of the war led to a cascading undercutting of the war effort: too few troops, too little coordination with civilian and governmental/non-governmental agencies and too little allotted time to achieve success."