“Labour has conceded for the first time that a “primitive understanding” of the Islamic world caused some of the problems faced by the west in Iraq and Afghanistan, and warned David Cameron his response to the terrorist crisis in north Africa shows he has not learned the painful lessons from those conflicts. In a speech on Thursday, Jim Murphy, the shadow defence secretary, will suggest the Blair government did not appreciate what it was getting itself into after the September 11 attacks, as British forces joined the international effort to overthrow the Taliban and hunt down Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network……….. In Iraq, he will say, “there was a serious deficit in Western comprehension of the Sunni-Shia or intra-Shia dynamics. We know that de-Baathification left a lethal vacuum.”………..…”

It said: “a primitive understanding of Islam”!
The British created modern Iraq, patched it together with a view toward their own control of it, as part of their empire. Gertrude Bell, Percy Cox, Churchill, and others decided early on to hand power to the same class of natives (Sunni Arabs) who had served the Turkish Ottoman occupation well both in the bureaucracy and in the military. They thought the same class would serve British interests well, which they did for a while. Of course there was the small matter of the restive Kurds, who were in fact reportedly gassed by the Royal Air Force, and the majority Shi’as, who were disregarded as ‘hostile to British interests’. Iraq has been unstable ever since 1917.
Now if the British can’t understand Islam and the nuances of its various sects, then how could other Westerners think they could unravel that complex (to Western eyes) issue? Certainly not the Israeli lobbyists that have edged out the old Arabists in the U.S. State Department and other policy-making institutions and think-tanks. They have no interest in delving deeply into Arab or Muslim culture: they seem to be limited by the motto of “Israel right or wrong“, as shown for example by Susan Rice at the UN. It is almost correct now to say that the Arabists have been almost completely replaced by Zionists in the American foreign policy establishment and the institutions that feed it with advice.

De-Baathification, like de-Nazification after World War II, was not a bad idea to start with. But that policy in Iraq was carried too far beyond the senior level of bureaucrats, which created political, economic, security, and other problems. Besides, all the Baathist military and security services melted away before the fall of Baghdad. They went AWOL, like deserters during war. The military and security did not even bother to defend its capital against invasion. So how much good could it have been: it was good at repressing the people but not to face a foreign attack.
Cheers
mhg