found this interesting article, so sharing excerpts:

How Bush Was "Churchilled" in Iraq
Strategic Insights, Volume III, Issue 6 (June 2004)
by Douglas Porch
Rather than the cakewalk assault allegedly promised by Iraqi exiles and echoed in Pentagon circles on the "central front in the War on Terror," increasingly Iraq appears to have become a distracting detour into a debilitating sideshow war. It may have been, as Walter Russell Mead argues, that the invasion of Iraq was a good case badly made by the Bush administration.
…
But in May 2004, former commander of U.S. Central Command General (retd.) Anthony Zinni argued that, compared to the strategic nightmare delivered by "preemption", containment appears positively idyllic. "The first mistake that will be recorded by history," Zinni argued of the Iraq War of 2003, will be "the belief that containment as a policy doesn't work." Containment required only a floating force that averaged 23,000 personnel at any one time, paid for in large measure by regional allies. "Never once when we decided to take action against Saddam, when he violated the sanctions, or the rules by which the inspectors operated under, never once were we denied permission to use bases, or airspace, or to strike from those places. We built a wonderful coalition, without any formal treaties, without any particular arrangement."

From: http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/si/2004/jun/porchJun04.asp

Published by:
Strategic Insights is a monthly electronic journal produced by the Center for Contemporary Conflict at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

"Churchilled", a term meaning, “a distracting detour into a debilitating sideshow war”.
As in:

Churchill's vision of a quick victory against Turkey in 1915 that would roll up the Central Powers' Balkan flank and open Russia to re-supply led straight to the dead-end Gallipoli campaign.