According to David Blunkett, former Home secretary for the Blair government, the Brits did all they could to prevent the biggest mistake of the early occupation: dismantling the Iraqi army. Money quote:
"The issue was: ‘What the hell do you do about it?' All we could do as a nation of 60 million off the coast of mainland Europe was to seek to influence the most powerful nation in the world," he said in interviews to publicise his new diaries.
"We did seek to influence them, but we were not in charge, so you cannot say that if only the government recognised what needed to be done, it would all have been different. The government did recognise the problem," he added.
"We dismantled the structure of a functioning state," he said, adding that the British view was: "Change them by all means, decapitate them even, but very quickly get the arms and legs moving."
The culprits? The usual suspects, Cheney and Rumsfeld.