It's complicated, because it started out as "smash the state and let democracy reassert itself". Everyone involved in the room had such a broken mental model of what the Iraqi population was like. American politicians have been getting drunk off the rhetoric of democracy for some time, and we typically forget that most governments are precariously balanced between multiple competing socioeconomic elements with eternal and unending grudges between one another. In the case of Iraq, what started as "invade and impose democracy" quickly progressed into policing sectarian violence as America inherited Saddam's problems.