Who lost Iraq?

That is the question Americans need to focus on now - because Iraq is a lost cause for America.

Of course, it was a fool's errand in the first place. The idea behind the invasion was to remove Saddam and allow the Iraqi's to establish a democratic government in his place. There was no consideration that Iraq might have been a nation only because a dictator such as Saddam or Tito in Yugoslavia was holding it together by force.

In such a case, removing the dictator has two possible outcomes. Either a new dictator heeds to appear, or the "nation" will devolve into its component parts. The decision regarding which of the two results will usually be made by civil war until the dictator appears, the components negotiate a peace or an outside force intervenes to force a peace.

That third choice was for the U.S. invaders to impose a peace on Iraq using U.S.-controlled military forces. They could then establish the kind of government we wanted them to choose. That is what the U.S. did in Italy, Germany and Japan after WW II. The USSR performed a similar function in the Eastern Bloc. But the U.S. did not have enough troops to do that in either Iraq or Afghanistan. They also had no allies who would provide the number of additional troops needed, and they (stupidly) disbanded the Iraqi Army as soon as the CPA took over under Jerry Bremer.

Saddam was a really nasty tyrant, but his military had already been demonstrated to be markedly inferior to that of the U.S. So Bush and Cheney wanted him replaced, and knew they could remove him. But the first function of any government is to provide peace and stability to its country.

The Republicans simply assumed that in the absence of the dictator the free and intelligent individuals of the state of Iraq would gather and form a democracy.

Bad assumption. Iraq is a tribal nation in which only 40.4% of the people age 15 and over can read and write. The absence of literacy in over half of the people in the nation means a sharp distrust of government systems unless each individual knows that the administrators are of their tribe.

So the Bush administration has removed the head of state, Saddam, and disbanded his government and his army. But they do not have enough troops in country to stop the civil war that is to be expected, and the troops that are there provide a reason for Iraqis to support the insurgency against the occupiers.

Unless we can get more troops, we are going to pull out and leave the civil war to expand. Training Iraqi forces is actually training the militias who will fight that civil war.

A positive outcome for the U.S, in Iraq is very unlikely. Who lost Iraq? Bush and Rumsfeld who undertook a jop that neither understood and that the U.S. had neither the troops nor the stomach for.

Afghanistan is already gone. See this article for a description of the disaster there.