Film-maker and author of TV series In the Thick of It and film In the Loop – both letting light into the shambles behind the scenes of government – Armando Ianucci reveals a shocking fact about the management of the reconstruction of post-war Iraq.
Writing in today’s Independent, he says that Donald Rumsfeld – and never a man better nicknamed than ‘Rummy’ – ‘weeded out from those going to help the reconstruction of Iraq anyone who could speak Arabic, on the grounds they would be pro-Arab.
‘As a result, it took the Americans 18 months to realise that when marines held up the flat of their hand to oncoming cars to signal them to stop, they were actually using the Irqai hand-signal for ‘come forward’.
‘That’s why so many families in cars were shot’.