This failure was simply a "matter of priorities", according to General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld thought it was a "stretch" to attribute the theft and destruction of priceless Mesopotamian artifacts to "any defect in the war plan".

Our government knew how to destroy but not how to build. We dismantled Saddam Hussein's bureaucracy and disbanded his army, but we did so with absolutely no understanding of even how to build a stable, rights-regarding government with broad popular support.

Such a government requires a prosperous economy, a secure society, and sufficient cultural unity to allow everyday interaction among different ethnic groups in workplaces, schools, hospitals, the army and the police.

Americans are still living with the aftermath of this ignorance, and we will be for decades to come. In 2003 and 2004, experts debated whether it would take one year or three to rebuild Iraq. Now we debate whether it will take 10 to 15 years or whether it can be done at all.

Those broken and stolen statues from the museum are the enduring symbols of what has gone so wrong. They were easy to smash, so hard to repair.

L. Paul Bremer III

Former presidential envoy to Iraq

Fifteen months before the 9/11 attacks, the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorism, on which I served as chairman, reported to the president and the American people that we faced a new and terrible threat: the nexus between states that supported terrorism and killers who wanted to murder Americans by the thousands and were prepared to die doing it.

For decades, US administrations from both parties had designated Saddam Hussein's Iraq a terrorist state.