Britain 'as inept as US' in failing to foresee postwar Iraq insurgency [View All]

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· Revelation undermines British blaming Rumsfeld
· Experts stressed danger of tribalism to Blair in 2002

Jonathan Steele
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2244156,00.html

The government's top foreign policy advisers were as inept as their US counterparts in failing to see that removing Saddam Hussein in 2003 was likely to lead to a nationalist insurgency by Sunnis and Shias and an Islamist government in Baghdad, run by allies of Iran, the Guardian has learned.

None of Whitehall's "Arabists" warned Tony Blair of the difficulties which have plagued the occupation. The revelation undermines the British claim that it was US myopia which was to blame for the failure to foresee what would happen in postwar Iraq.

"Everyone was unprepared for the aftermath," a former ambassador, who served in the region at the time, told the Guardian. "To my shame I was in the complacent camp . We underestimated the insurgency. I didn't hear anyone say, 'It'll be a disaster, and it'll all come unstuck'. People felt it was a leap in the dark but not that we were staring disaster in the face."

Privately, and in rare cases publicly, British ministers and officials have blamed the chaos of the occupation on blunders in Washington, pointing the finger particularly at Donald Rumsfeld, who was sacked as defence secretary in 2006. The Guardian's researches reveal that Britain's analysts were equally wrong.