My impression was that they always imaged something like occupied Europe after the second world war, where everyone would line up on the streets with US flags,

My impression was that they always imaged something like occupied Europe after the second world war, where everyone would line up on the streets with US flags, all the girls would fuck the soldiers, and then things would sort itself out in a relatively short amount of time. Of course none of that happened because the situations just aren't comparable in any meaningful way. --- Before one of the Dutch missions to Afghanistan there was a lot of talk of "winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people". Unlike the strict and "mean" US we'd be more friendly and charming. There is perhaps some truth to that, but none of that really changes the fundamentals. One of the reports about this had some embedded journalist accompanying Dutch troops doing their patrols in the Afghan villages checking for Taliban. They knock on a door. No one answers. They kick in the door and search the house. Later the owner comes back so they explain the situation and give him some money for the door after which they leave, having found nothing. The journalist asks the man what he thought of the Dutch troops to see if we had "won the hearts and minds". He stands there, with the money in his hand, and just says "they just destroyed my door". And what more is there to say? Imagine something like that would happen to you or me: the military would completely wreck our door and search our house while we're at work. No warrant. No probably cause. No nothing. Only "we were just checking". We'd cry authoritarian jackbooted fascists, and rightfully so. Now imagine they're foreign soldiers from the other side of the world who don't even speak your language. My point being: I'm not sure if it was ever going to be a success unless control could be handed over very quickly, and it always unlikely that was going to result in success – Afghanistan had been in a civil war for 10 years already, and Iraq is one of those fundamentally unstable post-colonial countries.