David Frum

Who's thinking about that?

This is the other really...

important mistake about Iraq.

And this is one I personally was most guilty of, so I'm very conscious of it.

So you looked at a picture of Baghdad in 2003, and you saw these buildings.

It looks sort of like buildings you knew.

And you thought, there must be people going to work in those buildings.

There must be something like a state.

So when you remove the 200 worst actors at the top, you'll inherit a state structure.

That's what happened in Japan in 1945, is the people of the Ministry of Tramways continue to go to work and to operate the tramways.

And it turned out, no, actually, there was no state.

The United States had broken and the Iraqis had broken that state long before.

There was nobody in those buildings.

They weren't doing anything.

So you remove the 200 worst actors, the whole thing disintegrated into chaos.

And it needed many more people, many more armed people to keep order in that society the United States had ever budgeted for or ever would budget for.

The original plans for Iraq said, you'll need 300,000 men.

And that, which, by the way, was the correct number, it turns out.

If people had accepted that, the Iraq War would never have happened.

No one was sending 300,000 to Iraq.