Did anyone accurately predict where the Iraq invasion would take us?

[Rashak_Mani]

One more here who remembers the Baghdad going to Stalingrad idea. Certainly that seemed the best way to bleed US forces… but apparently some Iraqi units went for some conventional warfare in places and naturally got their asses handed to them. Baghdad fell as much due to lack of higher leadership than will to fight… the leaders ran and naturally the soldiers melted away.

I think many predicted a hard time keeping the peace… that the Sunnis would be the major participants wasn’t foreseen though… since they would have been mostly killed in the battles for Baghdad ? Shia religious agitation would have seemed a more likely cause.

[ElvisL1ves]

@monavis

Dubya’s father didn’t go into Baghdad for the very reason of what is going on now.

Here you go.From A World Transformed by George HW Bush and Brent Scowcroft, who served his as National Security Adviser:

Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in “mission creep,” and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under the circumstances, there was no viable “exit strategy” we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. **Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations’ mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. ** It would have been a dramatically different — and perhaps barren — outcome.

Nobody could have every detail right in a prediction, but the general outline was pretty damn obvious to anyone but the cakewalkers and the loyalists.