To Put It Succinctly

The biggest American mistake in Iraq was to have established an occupation administration of the country. Iraqis are a fiercely proud and nationalistic people. By operating in a manner that was so often arrogant, imperial, ill-informed, isolated from Iraqi realities, and simply incompetent, we lost the confidence of the Iraqi public, and we fed a violent resistance that was probably inevitable but became much more extensive, deadly, and crippling as a result of our mistakes. Most Iraqis believe we are there for our own strategic interests—to secure access to Iraq's vast reserves of oil and to establish a permanent military foothold in the region—not to build democracy.