It has become conventional wisdom that the Bush administration had no plan for [Iraq] in the aftermath of the invasion, and many of those who criticize the administration's conduct of the war do so in the belief that better preparation would have enabled the policy of regime change to succeed. There can be no doubt that the war was launched without proper forethought, but it is questionable whether any degree of planning would have equipped American forces to cope with the anarchy of post-Saddam Iraq. While gross errors in policy such as the sudden disbanding of the Iraqi army by the chief American civilian administrator Paul Bremer contributed to the difficulties, the basic problem comes from the fragility of the state and the inability of American occupying forces to put anything enduring in its place.

First known as Mesopotamia when it was cobbled together by a British civil servant from provinces of the Ottoman Empire and established as a Hashemite kingdom in 1921, Iraq has always been a composite state with deep internal divisions. Saddam's regime— a Western-style secular dictatorship modeled on the Stalinist Soviet Union and National Socialist Germany— held Iraq together while inflicting severe repression on the Shia majority, the Kurds, and others. Overthrowing the regime emancipated these groups, and at the same time left the Iraqi state without power or legitimacy. American forces discovered they had destroyed a tyranny only to create a failed state.

The response of the Bush administration was to launch a program of "democratization," but the belief that democracy will bring stability is a delusion. When democracy spreads into countries containing populations that are long and deeply divided, the result is commonly that the state fragments. Iraq is divided not only by historic ethnic-religious enmities but also by rival claims to its oil reserves. In these conditions liberal democracy is a utopian project. A kind of democracy may be established, but it will be democracy Iranian-style—an Islamist version of Rousseau's illiberal dream.

Against this background a war over internal resources between the country's antagonistic communities is practically unavoidable, and in fact the process of disintegration seems already to have begun. Fundamentalist groups appear to have secured control of sections of key institutions such as the police and security forces and some cities are under de facto rule by Islamist militias. In these circumstances building up Iraqi forces that could replace those of the US and the UK in containing the insurgency— which is the basis of the administration's exit strategy—is impossible. Some critics of the administration see this situation as arising from an initial failure to deploy sufficient troops. Ralph Peters, a former army intelligence officer and well-known writer on strategic matters, blames "the apparatchiks of the Rumsfeld Pentagon," who "refused to allocate sufficient forces to mount a convincing occupation throughout Iraq." No doubt modish theories that understand warfare as an exercise in managerial efficiency contributed to the debacle. However, if America is facing strategic defeat in Iraq the reason is not that its forces there are insufficiently numerous. It is that their operations have never served any political goal that could be realized.

The most likely legacy of the war appears to be a balkanized Iraq and the enhanced power of radical Islam throughout the region, with Iran being the main beneficiary. This is hardly what might be expected of an imperial grand strategy designed to advance American interests, and Kaplan seems conscious of the discrepancy between his large claims for America's imperial role and the chaotic blundering reality. Commenting on the assault on Fallujah, he writes: "To be sure, the decision to invest Al-Fallujah and then pull out just as victory was within reach demonstrated both the fecklessness and incoherence of the Bush administration." It would be hard to fault his judgment of the administration. A rational foreign policy cannot be compounded from a mix of oil-driven realpolitik and millenarian faith in the transforming power of democracy.

While it's certainly possible that better preparation for the aftermath of the invasion might not have made an appreciable difference, given the artificial nature of the Iraqi state and the conflicts between its various populations, it's also certainly the case that it was completely and utterly irresponsible of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and company to have invaded without any clear idea at all at what kind of post-invasion strategy might have had the best chance of succeeding. Even if a responsible plan (such as that put forward by the State Department, but rejected by the Administration) had failed to stabilize the country, it could well have left it in a better state than it is in now, with corresponding more possibility for developing into a stable situation than seems conceivable at the moment.

It seems inevitable that Iraq will eventually be divided back up into its constituent parts (a Kurd state, a Shi'ite one and a Sunni one), but how the oil revenues will be divided between them is totally unclear to me -- although without an equitable division, one can see only decades of disputes between them breaking eventually into open warfare, which would destabilize the region even more, and potentially draw Iran and Turkey into the conflict.