The civil war that slowly filled the vacuum left by Saddam’s regime horrified the Bush administration and other supporters of the war, and left them somewhat flabbergasted as well. The conquest had been as swift as expected, but the aftermath was not going as planned. By the time the 2007 surge of troops and change in strategy helped to reduce the sectarian violence to perhaps more tolerable levels, untold tens – perhaps hundreds – of thousands were dead, including more than four thousand Americans, and millions more had fled. The Iraqi economy was a wreck and de facto ethnic cleansing had divided the country.The United States had managed to do the impossible: it had actually made life in Iraq worse than it had been under Saddam Hussein.