Of course...you gauge the success of a military operation both in terms of how it achieves its objectives--the gain--as well as in terms of casualties--the cost. While I still question whether we should have gone to war in the first place, I don't dispute that in that narrow calculus we gained more than in the Gulf War, by having gone all the way and taken the country, and paid a smaller price for it. But the calculation has more than those two factors: Factor in the price we paid in terms of international support and respect, and domestic screaming and yelling, and I'm not at all convinced it was a bargain.
As for how well the occupation's going, neither of us is there and we depend on secondhand reports. You're inclined to view the reports that support your point of view as being the objective ones, and those that don't support it as biased. I think that's a shaky set of assumptions. The casualties we suffer represent one of the small set of hard facts we have to work with--those couldn't be distorted by either side. The casualty rate (or more fundamentally, the rate and severity of attacks on our forces) seems to be rising over time, and that's not cause for celebration.
In the last week or so the official interpretation of the attacks has shifted. For a long time we were told that they were perpetrated by a small number of disgruntled, disorganized, "dead enders". But now the story is that it's an organized effort, planned before the war, and with caches of weapons and supplies prepositioned; the Republican Guard didn't fold, it deliberately melted away into the countryside. In that light, perhaps it was premature, or at least hair-splitting, to declare "major combat" to be over. It may now be "asymmetric warfare", but we're still at war with a determined opponent. A war doesn't end just because one side changes tactics. With total postwar casualties now equalling in-war casualties, I'd say the war is still seriously continuing.
As you say in this post, the occupation of Iraq is without a valid precedent
Actually, I didn't say either way. You really should invest the effort in reading the RAND report, at least chapter 9 summarizing the lessons of history, and chapter 10, on the prospects in Iraq. What I'd have said about comparisons would've been based on what the report says (emphasis added):
Not since the occupation of Germany and Japan has the United States undertaken such an ambitious task: the military occupation of a sizable country and a stated commitment to wholesale political transformation. Bosnia and Kosovo are the most comparable in terms of ambition, but both are smaller entities and are in more-conducive strategic environments, and the interventions enjoyed more international support. As in Bosnia and Kosovo, there is no consensus on the nature of the Iraqi nation; Iraq has a deeply fractured polity, with entrenched sectarian and ethnic divides. Unlike the Balkans, Iraq is in an unstable and undemocratic region and is surrounded by neighbors who will be unsympathetic to democratization. Hence, Iraq combines many of the most troublesome features of the other cases analyzed in this report.
America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq , Chapter 10
Not completely without precedent, but perhaps unique in combining "many of the most troublesome features of the other cases".
Is it reasonable to expect the Bush Administration to have had a plan for occupation? Hell yes. I heard Wesley Clark say this morning on Meet the Press that Pentagon officers told him shortly after 9/11 that they were already planning for war against Iraq. Couldn't somebody have thought to ask RAND for this study then, or early in 2002, instead of waiting until July 2003? Cripes! How many lives and how much anguish could they have saved with one simple phone call?!?!
Finally, as for the "quagmire" issue, I think it comes not only from the similarities in the surface facts of the situation, but very much from the similarities in the official pronouncements, which eventually were exposed as bald-faced lies. "We're making significant progress", "pacification is going well", "it's only a matter of time"; and the fierce pledges to stay the course until the bitter end...and bitter indeed was the end of the Vietnam War. History may not always be an exact guide to the future, but it's sure prudent to pay attention to the lessons of history. The Bush Administration obviously wanted this war, and they've staked their (and our country's) credibility on it. I think I'd be crazy to take their rhetoric about it as being neutral and objective statements of fact. They're spinning furiously.