Tripp, an Arabist and professor of politics at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas), is in the vanguard of western scholars of Iraq. He first visited in the 1980s during the war with Khomeini's Iran. To his regret he has not been back since the US-led invasion - neither wanting to worry his family, get stuck and out of touch in Baghdad's Green Zone or be a "hideous liability" to his Iraqi friends. But he has followed events closely - and, crucially, unlike so many of those involved in the war and occupation - against the indispensable background of what came before.
"There was this nonsensical idea that Saddam and everything he created was a kind of freak and that once you eradicated him the whole thing would fall apart and the potential for a liberal, democratic and a civil society would emerge as if somehow he was the only problem," he says. "But Saddam was a recognisable part of Iraqi history. Many Iraqis feel now that they've been delivered into the hands of many lesser dictators. As one of my friends said: '
Thanks very much: you got rid of one Saddam and you left us with 50.'"
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Part of the problem, he argues, was profound ignorance about what went on beneath the surface of Saddam's dictatorship, what he calls a "shadow state" that ran on cooption, collaboration and patronage as well as repression and fear. That led to the disastrous decision to outlaw the Ba'ath party. "Lack of understanding on that score was unbelievable. By purging it you alienated tens of thousands of people who would otherwise have very happily served the next regime. They weren't going to work for the restoration of Saddam Hussein.
They only joined the Ba'ath because that was what they had to do. When you decapitate that shadow state you don't get rid of the old networks. They just look for a new patron: hence the resistance."
The same "blindness", as Tripp calls it, was at work when the order came to dissolve the Iraqi army and the entire security apparatus of the old regime, giving a huge boost to what was to become a fully-fledged Sunni insurgency.
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'You got rid of one Saddam and you left us with 50'
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