Andrew Sullivan says all you need to know about the Iraq War debacle is in this Telegraph obit of Sir Hilary Synnott, a career British diplomat who served for a time as the governor of British-occupied Basra. And I say further that all you really need to know is in this paragraph from the obit:

The CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] itself, he found, was mainly staffed by American policy wonks — “young, naive, pushy people” fired with a messianic zeal rapidly to replace centuries of tribal and religious rivalries and state control with democracy and free markets, and displaying a dogmatism that, as Synnott drily noted, “cut no ice” with the Iraqis.