Things would be bad, but not as bad as they are now. I doubt Petraeus would have disbanded the Iraqi Army or allowed the orgy of looting to continue for weeks before doing anything about it. He would definately have paid greater attention to cultural sensativity and relations with local leaders, clerics, and tribal sheiks.
Disbanding the Iraqi Army was the right thing to do.
First of all, the Army had already disbanded itself. There is no reason to think Shi'ite soldiers conscripted into service by Saddam would have heeded an order to serve in an Army they never wanted to be a part of to begin with.
Second, making the recreation of the main tool by which Saddam oppressed his people our first act as occupiers of Iraq would have poisoned our image in the eyes of the Iraqi people.
Third, the Saddam-era security services we did keep proved to be more a harm than a help in post-war Iraq. We did keep the Saddam era police forces intact and they proved to be brutish and disloyal and were hated by the population. We had to later disband this force and start a new police force fro scratch. We also reconstituted part of the Army in the form of the Fallujah Brigade, and it turned out to be one of our worst mistakes of the occupation.
