A question

After the successful prosecution of the war, the victorious government found itself unprepared for the post war period. The occupying force established an government and began to seek to impose radical cultural and social changes. After a couple of years, elections were allowed to replace the appointees. The former ruling class was left with ownership of much of the remaining capital, and there were hundreds of thousands of armed former soldiers of the old regime who disappeared into the population. A massive insurgency occurred. After a decade or so, as the political support for the reconstruction effort disintegrated, the victorious government withdrew its troops and ended the efforts to impose political and cultural change.

Is this description based on the Civil War or the Iraq War?

"Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it."

After the Civil War, the former slaves in the South had a brief period of hope in which they began to vote and have civil rights and schools were opened for their children. That hope was extinguished, they were disenfranchised and largely reduced to peonage and involuntary servitude that lasted for decades. Indeed, in the 20th century the Ku Klux Klan was recreated and grew to a new level of regional and even national power. Antebellum culture was modified in the South, but only in the sense that the institutions that insured supremacy of one group over the other were slightly modified.

Dictatorships and/or coercive governments were established in the aftermath of U.S. invasions of Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and U.S. support of regime changes in Guatemala and Chile. American intervention has seldom produced democratic governments in the 20th century.

Let us hope that the experience in Iraq and Afghanistan are better!