...that the United States Army lacked and continues to lack any sort of coherent counter-insurgency doctrine. With the US Army, if you don't have a doctrine, the chance that you'll have a viable strategy trends to zero (this is not true of all militaries, BTW - both the British Army and the CF cheerfully ignore doctrine in favour of winning strategy; this is something that you can do in craft rather than industrial armies). Without that viable strategy, it really doesn't matter what else you do. In that sense, yes, this is a bigger thing than just Rumsfeld and the usual suspects. You take Shinseki's force levels and you combine them with a strategy , then you've got something - but it takes both elements.

"We declared war on terror, it's not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I'm sure we'll take on that bastard ennui." - Jon Stewart.

it's not the car's fault if I take it out in a blinding snowstorm.

The car doesn't become more culpable if the driver didn't have a compelling existential reason for being out in the storm in the first place. Nor does his claiming "I didn't know there was a storm coming" in the face of so very many weather reports - a great deal of which predicted the insurgency.

Driver failure all around, whether it's 1) failure to sift conflicting weather data and come to the right prediction, 2) failure to assign proper values when weighing the necessity of venturing out vs the risks, or 3) failure - as the person directly responsible for the maintenance of the vehicle - to understand the necessity for windshield wipers and make sure they work first.

It's a little more serious than the car not having windshield wipers and encountering inclement weather. The lack of a counter-insurgency doctrine is more akin to the car lacking any gears other than reverse - even if the pavement's completely dry, things don't really work. It was reasonably forseeable to anyone that could fog the mirror since before the fall of the Sovs that counter-insurgency was the dominant mode of warfare for the forseeable future and that a coherent doctrine was needed.

Yes the driver bears blame, and that blame is likely primary, but there's a bunch of others that contributed and those contributions were very, very significant.

"We declared war on terror, it's not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I'm sure we'll take on that bastard ennui." - Jon Stewart.

The US army isn't designed for anti-insurgency or occupation. However, led competently (see: Kosovo, reconstruction) it can do it. There was a window in the first six months or so where there was very little insurgency activity - what was mainly required was to rebuild, using locals and to flood the country with money, so everyone (or close enough) was happy.

But paying pork to domestic concerns was more important and so was stupid ideology and payback like dismissing the army, purging Ba'ath members (the secular technocrats who actully, um, ran the country) and imposing free market fundamentalism on Iraq to turn it into the sort of country the idiots want the US to be. (For example, I know they wanted to dismantle the dole system which made sure very single Iraqi got fed - which was very efficient, effective and non-corrupt. Lost track of whether they actually did.)

Really good anti-insurgency troops weren't needed - the ability to hand out contracts to Iraqis was. But Iraqis aren't Bush pioneers, so so much for that.

...above. However, what is it that tells an army to do or not do those things? A doctrine. Why did they do the wrong things? Because they were led by people who did not understand what was going to happen because they lacked an effective doctrine.

In the absence of doctrine all the folks at the lower levels who saw what was happening could do was say "in my professional military opinion, this doesn't look like a good idea". Saying something contravenes doctrine carries a lot more weight and it's something that higher is much less likely to ignore.

"We declared war on terror, it's not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I'm sure we'll take on that bastard ennui." - Jon Stewart.