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What’s even more humiliating for Britain is that British leaders couldn’t exploit the advantages they had over their American counterparts in terms of past history of military operations and involvement in Iraq. It’s not an overstatement to say that the British had been fighting on their own turf in Basra. When they returned to that city in 2003, they returned to the very bases they had built only half a century before. Moreover, they had accumulated comprehensive knowledge of the people and tribes of the region that even many Iraqis don’t have.
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A half century ago? Those guys would be 70 years old, and their officers are probably dead. What are the current Brits going to do, channel the old guard? Are there some secret diaries? The dynamics of Iraq, "a half century ago", is long gone.
"Accumulated comprehensive knowledge" is a joke, especially in the middle east. There are, floating around the web, pamphlets issued by the Brits and the US, as guides for servicemen interacting with various middle eastern populations. They are a fucking joke today and probably were then.
If the Iraqis had helped the Brits, Basra wouldn't have been taken over, but they would rather sit on their collective asses, like a mother-in-law bitching about not being taken care of.