British diplomat says "We would have been better off just giving Saddam Hussein 10 billion dollars to be a good boy"

Apparently this Rory Stewart, the son of a diplomat, was made the governor of a section of Iraq and tasked with rebuilding a community. He has since written a book. "Occupational Hazards", about his experiences in Iraq.

It is somewhat eclectic and his attitude is one of fascination rather then revulsion at the carnage he saw. All in all it is and entirely unique take on the situation in this wartorn region.

Although Stewart grew disillusioned with a war that he supported, he has warnings for liberals, too: you just have to accept, he says, that Iraqis will brutalise each other. We would have been better off, he insists, bribing Saddam Hussein with $10 billion to be a good boy: “Iraq has cost $450 billion, that is $2,000 for every man, woman and child in America. Would it have been so evil to keep Saddam?”

More mischievously still, he argues that once we were in we should have listened to Donald Rumsfeld and got straight out again. The ditching of Colin Powell’s celebrated post-invasion strategy is blamed for the chaos, but Stewart disagrees. “I saw the State Department plan and it was not great,” he discloses. “It was couched in such general terms. It said, ‘if looting occurs you should try to stop it’, but it did not say, ‘there will be catastrophic looting in Baghdad and it will take 1m troops to prevent it’.”

The only strategy was denial: nobody could admit that anarchy reigned because it would be an admission that the invasion had been a fiasco.

Well stated.