From a commentary Jonathan Steele wrote for the Guardian.

Many critics blame the occupation's difficulties on a lack of planning, and a series of mistakes in the first few months, including the disbanding of the Iraqi army and failures to provide Iraqi with electricity and water. The line is summed up in the phrase "Winning the war but losing the peace".

But this assumes that a more intelligent and efficient occupation could have worked. It is an extraordinary notion. Like other Arabs, Iraqis have a long memory of US and British intervention in the Middle East, toppling regimes and controlling puppet governments, both to maintain an imperial presence and for the sake of oil. As soon as the Americans made it clear in mid-2003 that their occupation was going to be openended and without a timetable for troop withdrawal, Iraqi nationalists were bound to become suspicious and start resisting.

Yet L Paul Bremer, Iraq's American overlord, as well as his political masters in Washington, used the template of the occupations of Germany and Japan in 1945. They seemed to forget they were occupying an Arab country with a long history of anti-western resistance.

Upon reading that last paragraph, an educated reader, one with a passing knowledge of the history of Iraq and neighboring countries, would probably say something like "No shit, Sherlock. Who wouldn't know that would be a bad idea?" That reader would then remember, "Oh yeah, the leaders of two of the most powerful nations in the world couldn't figure it out."

That's what this whole blog is about. I've touched on related issues, like the wisdom of engaging in colonial foreign policy altogether, but the main focus has always been on the fact that the people put in charge of sending my country's soldiers to war were profoundly ignorant of the people they intended to make war on. But worse than that is that the press in my country has barely discussed this; that's why I mostly quote British sources. Even worse than that is that the opposition political party has discussed it only slightly more.

Other Iraqi exiles, as well as foreign experts on the country, had seen the danger well before the invasion. They tried to warn Bush and Blair that there would be resentment and resistance. Saddam could be toppled easily, but this would not be victory. As long as the occupation continued, it would provoke suspicion and hostility which could quickly lead to an armed insurgency. They also pointed out that the people who would fill the post-Saddam vacuum would be Islamists, both Shia and Sunni. Whatever political structures were put in place, these anti-western groups would become the dominant force. Amazingly, few people in the Bush administration or in the British Foreign Office got the point. Much attention has been given to Washington's failures of military intelligence in believing Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction. The failure of political intelligence was equally disastrous. Put another way, the invaders' real problem was not a lack of planning, but a lack of analysis.

A failure to think