Andrew Stuttaford isn't entirely clear about his printing of an excerpt but the message of the Daily Telegraph's Con Coughlin is. "Iraq was still a functioning state by the time coalition commanders assumed responsibility for governing the country," writes Coughlin, "and had things stayed that way" — ah, should have, could have. Coughlin's alternate course might have worked had Iraq's state echelons been made up of patent clerks and traffic cops — instead of familial second-string mass murderers, secret police, uniformed thugs, payroll gangs, streetcorner sycophants and leveraged tribes.
Yes, if only a government designed to restrain every aspect of the Iraqi population's humanity had been spared, the elements of a former government designed to restrain every aspect of the Iraqi population's humanity would not be party to the murder of thousands of people in an effort to regain power and return to restraining every aspect of the Iraqi population's humanity.
Coughlin closes on Prime Minister Tony Blair's failure "in his duty to the peoples of both Britain and Iraq." Those peoples wished to see Saddam Hussein swapped for a potentate who a) might have waited a few years before following the same turgescent ambitions of consolidation, armament and belligerence; or b) might have ruled so weakly that the institutional disintegration cited by autopsists David Kaye and Charles Duelfer would serve mass-destructive weapons to terrorists sooner than feared in 2003?
Maybe, but in any case there is a reason why, immediately after the end of the Second World War, General Douglas MacArthur's General Headquarters snubbed Allied liaisons and shut London and Moscow out of occupied Japan. Britain's finest minds once essayed in Iraq what Coughlin regrets Blair himself had not, executive rearrangement in an unrepresentative and violent authoritarian culture: the result was a Hashemite monarchy, torn down in 1958 by societal gangsterism that a policy of supercilious indifference left intact.