The Insurrection in Mesopotamia

"What we are seeing today in Iraq is the beginnings of a second Shia uprising, against the US in particular now that we are sort of the only ones left there. Yes, and it is about a tribal uprising which came as a surprise to the British. When they first saw it, they couldn’t interpret it. They were occupiers living in compounds, without any sense of the country – much like what is going on today. I think Churchill called the place an ungrateful volcano, and that’s what it is. It’s not possible to impose a nation within those borders, especially when outsiders try to do it. Gertrude Bell did. She got a good sense of the country. She was an English writer, archaeologist, political officer and traveller, around at the turn of the 20th century. I think you need long exposure and you have to have the Foreign Office – or for us the State Department – listening to people there. If you look at the war in Iraq, anyone with any sense at all said this is a really stupid idea. Any Iraqi who’d spent time in his country said the same thing. Still, Whitehall and the White House excluded them from the conversation, as did the newspapers. I don’t think things have really got much better. I suppose more money has been put into things like telephone intercepts. The real improvement in conducting warfare in remote areas is the drones, but that’s not intelligence. It’s a military weapon. For legal reasons the CIA takes care of it, but it is a Department of Defense weapon. “The real improvement in conducting warfare in remote areas is the drones, but that’s not intelligence. It’s a military weapon.” But for me, better intelligence means getting better at languages and having longer real exposure to the hard parts of the world. Not long ago, I met an Australian anthropologist who spent five years in the tribal areas of Pakistan. He speaks Pashto, and he got a sense of it because he was actually living there and knew all the people in the tribes. And they confided in him. But what intelligence agency has the leisure or the will to put somebody in one of these areas for any length of time? It is this bureaucratic, Harvard Business School approach to intelligence. If you can sell widgets you sell them and it doesn’t matter where you are. Numerous agents based in Beijing don’t speak Mandarin – that is fairly normal."