Iraq’s infrastructure in that April had emerged relatively unscathed. The rapid U.S. advance explained this, in part, but it also happened by design. A British general in the joint U.S.-British command structure, Albert Whitley, “saved” the Iraqi railways by removing them from the target lists. When I saw Whitley at the newly reopened British embassy’s first reception in early May, he reluctantly acknowledged that he’d “played a role.” His staff went further, calling him, for real or in jest, a “self-confessed ‘train spotter.’” “What was I supposed to do?” he asked over a gin and tonic. “They were going to destroy the Iraqi railways.”

Reconstruction meant money. The occupation promised a better life, which meant repairs, new construction and a rapid resurgence of prosperity remembered from the 1970s. The many OMB and inspector-general reports since 2003 have focused on waste and mismanagement in U.S. contracting, but attention given to these factors misses a major occupation error—the failure to use Iraqi technical proficiency. We needed them, including their eyes and ears: local technicians would prevent sabotage. Iraqi contractors waited for a call that never came.

“Following the money” usually means intelligence agencies greasing the skids. Reporting from Afghanistan about cash subsidies in Kabul reveals a familiar story. But the smart money in Iraq cared little for suitcases full of cash. We needed to be conversant and friendly with Iraqi business families, a different matter from buying off a warlord here or a general there. It meant making journeys such as a trip I made to the lobby of London’s Dorchester Hotel, opposite Hyde Park, where I met the cunning, elderly nephew of a 1950s Iraqi finance minister. This man, who likes to be called Abu Mohamad, described how he and other traders kept Iraq’s currency stable until the invasion. Abu Mohamad and his peers are as essential to Iraq as were the Fugger family of Augsburg and other bankers to Renaissance princes.

IN FEBRUARY of the invasion year, I joined a newly formed Office of Global Communications at the White House, created after 9/11 to address the “Why Do They Hate Us?” question. I went to Qatar in the same month to work on the public-affairs side of U.S. Central Command preinvasion preparations.

When Baghdad fell, I went to Kuwait tasked with a vague brief to help “stand up” a new and independent Iraqi media. The White House detail lasted until early June, but I returned to Iraq in various guises in later months and years. The initial plan for a new Iraqi media involved closing regime outlets and channeling funds toward what one American adviser hoped would become the “Wall Street Journal of Iraq.” This paper, Al-Sabah, made its appearance before the risks of collaboration with the occupation had become too high.

What we needed then was a reliable daily broadsheet. We also needed at least a month’s suppression of publications or radio programming that were adding confusion and inciting opposition. We needed, here also, to show authority. Iraqis expected it. Bremer’s two-page May 7, 2003, presidential letter of appointment gave him full plenipotentiary powers, but that was not how the occupation behaved. A well-intentioned policy permitting an “anything goes” media in Baghdad created unrest and delegitimized the occupation. No number of newly arrived public-affairs reservists could fix that fundamental defect. We spent time each day in damage-control mode reacting to yesterday’s mischief.

One April evening, ORHA staffer Paul Hughes and I lay spread-eagled on the roof of the riverside palace, chosen as ORHA headquarters. We watched, in high vertical procession, flare after red flare hovering over a distant highway, signaling U.S. Army units moving around the city, different colors indicating the convoy’s composition.

We discussed how most officers of the Iraqi Army and Special Republican Guard were coming into the city in good order and awaiting further instructions. This is what Raad al-Hamdani had meant, though he had followed orders to defend the regime and hadn’t “stood aside.” While the U.S. Third Army destroyed his Medina Division, most other units had survived. Conscripts had disappeared after the war, but the officer corps remained intact.

“The intent of Raad’s comment is accurate,” Hughes said years later, after he had served on the Iraq Study Group, created in 2006 to reassess the war and make recommendations for changing U.S. policy toward Iraq. “The Iraqi military fully thought they would be part of the solution.”

Between the battlefield success of PSYOPs and the decision to cast aside the existing military lay a major disconnect. We had the skills, then, to weed out the psychopathic ideologues using informers and “smart” occupation practices—like those used by Simon Elvy. But American legalism and a false equivalency between Iraq and the experience of the defeated Axis powers nearly sixty years earlier gave us instead a one-size-fits-all decision.

A former under secretary of defense in the 1990s, Walter Slocombe, had taken the ORHA senior advisory position for the Iraqi defense ministry, but he was the very last “adviser” to arrive in Baghdad. When he did, one of his aides told me: “We are committing a colossal blunder. If we disperse the Iraqi officer corps, we will let loose literally thousands of men, all with weapons training and combat experience, men not beholden to us in any way.” Returning from his first visit to Iraq in June, Wolfowitz called me about this subject. I had raised the issue of the Iraqi Army’s disbandment when seeing him in the Pentagon just before he went to Baghdad. “It’s too late to change it now,” he reported on his return.

The recent ten-year retrospectives on the war have revisited familiar charge sheets: all casus belli fabricated; no WMD; no postinvasion plans worthy of the name; and giving carte blanche to lowlife looters to steal office furniture, national antiquities and girls on the street. And then the crowning ineptitude: disbanding the army and evicting all Baathists. Retrospectives see the war as a type of kinetic midwifery, a one-sided and spasmodic prelude to “what came next.” The “strategic error” cited by Brent Scowcroft, national-security adviser to the realist Bush, George H. W. Bush, haunts us still—namely, the invasion’s tilting of strategic advantage toward Iran, just as our abrupt unseating of the Taliban had done eighteen months earlier.

A long line of cautionary advice, from Xenophon or Machiavelli to many shelves of U.S. military after-action reports, shows the same conclusion: conquerors of restless lands have tightly rationed time limits within which they must show authority, replace or neutralize enemy elites, and tilt history in favorable ways. Then they must leave. On every marble lintel over all our armed-services academies, the following words should be chiseled: get the hell out of wherever you’ve landed, and get out fast.

America’s occupation experience mostly rests on short-duration expeditionary wars or punitive actions, each with a different tempo. In these ostensibly short-duration conflicts, the task differs from conquest. In these events, we make our point and get out. Today we fancy ourselves distant from the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century strutting of imperial powers, never hesitant to teach the natives a lesson or give them a whiff of grapeshot. Our own nineteenth-century expeditionary annals show many obscure forays in “lesson teaching,” in places such as the Barbary Coast, Sumatra and Samoa. But we also sent a light force (just seven thousand troops) to seize Mexico City in 1847 and occupy it just long enough to force a peace treaty on the Mexicans. In the Spanish-American War, we seized more land and embroiled ourselves in occupation and counterinsurgency. Occupation is much tougher than lesson teaching but, in both cases, the Golden Hour ticks away, a severely constrained window of time, a “moment” lasting an hour or a month, offering a brief chance to overwhelm, overawe and then call it quits on our terms.

Films and books about the American experience in Iraq usually portray a type of sullen death-dealing competence by lethal twenty-somethings. The films treat the place as mere backdrop, in much the same way the video gamers use “terrorist settings” as a stage to blow away opponents. Iraq as a place—actual, cultural, strategic—still eludes basic understanding. The sense of history even deserted the British in this last invasion, but in earlier times they had absorbed it in good measure. I remember American officials at a preinvasion meeting in Washington belittling the British role in Iraq after 1914 on the notion that they had “failed” because their tenure in Iraq lasted “only” forty years.

So why has the American public shown so little interest in the invasion’s aftermath? Perhaps it’s because the Iraqis haven’t been supine. They reluctantly welcomed our removal of a regime whose level of violence and torture still astounds; in buildings near ORHA’s old monarchical palace headquarters, our teams came across DVDs recording torture scenes for the amusement of Saddam’s sons. A mother and child being fed to lions. Rapes. Snuff films.

Thus, one might want to consider the good that we also did. I remember a naval reserve officer, Sandy Hodgkinson, who went out each morning in April 2003, looking for the mass graves filled with the former regime’s victims. She found them soon enough. Day after day, she traveled under minimal escort to wretched locations where local people, hushed and sad yet frantic with a strange type of traumatized hope, pointed out mounds where people had been killed and bulldozed into trenches. As ORHA’s weeks lengthened, more atrocity graves came to notice. Documented with initial forensic work, the graves revealed in abundance a justification for war that the WMD canard failed to provide.

Image: Pullquote: Gene pulled a little Beretta revolver out of his holster and placed it on the table. "Any more democracy talk today?" he asked.Essay Types: Essay