Contributor(s): Jonathan Steele | Jonathan Steele will argue that the occupation has failed, not because of a lack of pre-war planning, but because of a lack of informed political analysis by US decision-makers and the British Foreign Office. They failed to see that Islamists, Sunni and Shia, would fill the post-Saddam vacuum and that most Iraqis would quickly come to resent yet another Western intervention in the Middle East.