In war after war, and not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington and London blundered in small things and large. There is no reason to suppose that their record will be any better in Ukraine 📧 Read Patrick Cockburn’s latest newsletter
. If failure was inevitable, then individual errors cannot have determined the final outcome. Apocalyptic denunciations of the war as a whole have had the unintended result of letting the perpetrators off the hook and preventing others from learning from their mistakes.The grim consequence of failing to learn from the Iraq invasion is to repeat many of its errors from Kabul to Benghazi.
The invasion had gone easier than expected: the Iraqi army did not fight because it knew it would lose and because, by 2003, very few Iraqis were willing to die defending a regime that had effectively destroyed their country by disastrously invading Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990. Three-fifths of Iraqis are Shia Arabs, one-fifth are Kurds and one-fifth are Sunni Arabs. The Baathist regime had been largely dominated by the Sunni but by 2003 even they wanted a political change at the top.
I have a vivid memory of an incident in Baghdad in October 2003 when Iraqi guerrillas rigged up a mobile rocket battery that fired rockets at 6am into the al-Rashid Hotel where Paul Wolfowitz, the then US deputy secretary of defence and one of the architects of the invasion, was staying. He rushed down the stairs through the smoke in his pyjamas, saying that the attack demonstrated the desperation of the remnants of the old regime.
Enthusiasm for the deal is stronger in Tehran than in Riyadh where suspicions remain high. Iran has been seeking a deal to escape diplomatic and economic isolation for at least two years. Saudi Arabia no longer walks in lockstep with Washington whose sympathy for the Saudi regime is limited because of its determination to keep oil prices high and navigate a more independent economic path.
Another development to watch is the extent to which the Saudi-Iranian deal de-escalates the historic confrontation between Sunni and Shia Muslims.magazine to be a fascinating but irritating read. Many of its articles are important, original and supported by detailed research. Others are dollops of conventional wisdom written up in a cocksure tone as if they were brimming with significant insights.
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