The 'war' part was magnificent. What came next has been pretty dam' good, but with the American public's standard of cheap, fast, and perfect, even as well as we've done may not be good enough. (And yeah, I'm prepared to defend that proposition, but it's another subject, for another thread.)
The three major mistakes that, had they NOT been made, would've seen us safely home and victorious by now were:
1. The Iraqi armed forces should not have been disbanded wholesale and sent 'home'. (They didn't go 'home'; they went into the field in a new, harder to defeat form.)
2. The borders were never properly secured, which was a function of too few troops. If they had been, the dead-enders and fanatics would all be dead by now, and the chokehold would've squeezed off the windpipe of the insurgents from the men, money and materiel they need to keep going.
3. Our Information Operations and Public Affairs effort has been for SH!T. We screwed it up, never got it right, neglected it, and totally blew off the single most important aspect of this entire thang. If this war succeeds or fails, it will be because of this, the most important part of the battlespace: the information realm.
To win as fast as the American, Iraqi and world publics expected us to, we should've fought the war exactly as it was (and with a proper 'prep', Turkey could've been persuaded/forced to allow us through into northern Iraq, as our plan called for, but which the Europeans screwed us out of).
After that, take command of the surviving and controllable parts of the Iraqi Armed Forces (all of the Air Force, as they nearly-universally HATED Saddam), the apolitical 'line' units of the Army, the patrol and beat cops (none of their commanders, nor the Republican Guard, though, for obvious reasons), and most importantly (as detailed below), the Border Guards. Set them to work alongside our guys hunting down and killing the regime bubbas that were on the run, BEFORE they could get their hidey-holes all set (it took about two months for 'em to get very adept at avoiding capture; we had a small window to sweep 'em all, we just didn't know how important it would be to do that), AND to wipe out the Fedayeen Saddam and the other out-and-out terrorists. Their other important mission would've been to secure all weapons depots, and provide the muscle under American supervision to keep 'em locked down tight.
Next, begin the dual missions of training the Iraqis to take on the security mission, while laying the groundwork for return-to-sovereignty. (That was another AWESOME success story that everyone seems to have forgotten. The Iraqis were running their country LONG before anybody thought it would be possible.) While the training cadre is doing that, release as many American troops as possible as soon as possible to get out to the Syrian and Iranian frontiers and SEAL 'EM UP. STRICTLY. This gets the majority of our troops out of sight of the big towns, so they're not 'running things', and it doesn't look as much like an occupying force. Also, we can plausibly state (because it would be true) that we are defending Iraqis and their born-again country from outside troublemakers. NO American troops go home until the borders are under control. Once the battlefield is isolated, we begin the hard but finite work of grinding down the enemy order-of-battle, and it'll go a helluva lot faster as the enemy knows there is no help coming. They'll quit.
And finally...and it's too heart-breaking to really go into...we should've done our very best work in the arena that was quite literally neglected and left to wither: the information battlefield. I simply don't have enough time to go into what I would've done differently here, but I'll tell you this: it would've been WAY better, even if I'd half-assed it all, because at least I would've been in the game.
THAT is how I would've done it, now that we're here on Monday morning, as we all know so dam' much about how WE could've won the Super Bowl.
