Iran was a much harder target than Iraq. More mountains, more unified populace, a whole bunch of factors. Iraq had been crushed by a decade of sanctions and as far as I know never really recovered from the destruction wrought in 91. I have no idea how smart anyone in the Bush admin was, whether they had any idea what they were actually up against. Their complete, buffoonish ignorance about Iraqi culture and politics was a constant topic of discussion back in the day. The whole yellow cake kayfabe.
It’s hard for me, at least, to say how much of Iraq was planned and how much was a raft of fools stumbling from one disaster to another but always having unlimited funds and materiel to throw in to the chaos to keep things going. I’ve heard people who were there talk about the absolute clusterfuck at every level - From US soldiers who never really understood what they were doing, from people who worked in the “reconstruction” effort and described just mind-blowing levels of cultural ignorance and ideology. Views on the motive for the invasion have changed a lot over the years. It went form oil, to MIC grifting, to a large scale strategic plot to destabilize the region.
it was probably equal parts planned, plans going bad, culturally ignorant and incurious Americans, and the chaos of an inept state with an inpet military doing something really stupid with no clear objective. The US government isn’t a monolith, it’s neither helplessly foolish nor hyper competent. And probably a lot of cases where people’s expertise in one area didn’t translate to general competence.
Like I remember the absolute fiasco when un-armored Humvees that were never supposed to be anything but scout and utility vehicles started getting owned by IEDs. There was this whole period were the public found out that soldiers were welding scrap metal to their trucks to try to protect themselves from bombs. They found out there was really no defense against IEDs, the whole concept of an IED entered the public consciousness. I think the body armor thing was happening at the same time, where infantry didn’t have worth while body armor. Just cheap flak vests from the 80s if they had anything. It was a huge public relations disaster for Bush. They had to dump a lot of resources in to procurring body armor and MRAPs (Mine resistant ambush protected, a kind of large truck looking APC). The MRAP thing was a fiasco, every firm in the US that knew how to weld was building these over-weight, badly engineered, barely functional monster trucks. The US Army’s hardware is notoriously shit, from what I remember all they had at the time for infantry transport was unarmored trucks, bradley IFVs, and shitty old M113s. maybe a few of whatever the predessecor to the strykers was.
So they put in all these procurrement orders for any truck with armor and a V-hull, and they get tons of shitty overweight trucks that couldn’t go off road due to their massive weight and being massive top heavy, they couldn’t go on many roads in iraq for the same reason, they were all slapped together by MIC grifters so there were all kinds of parts problems, it was a huge mess on every level.
What happened there? Did the regime not anticipate the use of bombs and mines to ambush patrols? Did they think the Iraqis would just surrender and they wouldn’t need armored vehicles or body armor? Did they anticipate those things but believe that the US public would accept the resulting casualties? I have no idea. There are probably documents somewhere. How much of it was ignorance, how much was foolishness, how much was poor planning, how much was calculated indifference?