This wasn't a question of sophisticate vs rustic - it was a question of Bush officials so convinced of a WWII-era European-style reception to GI's in Iraq that they blinded themselves to sectarian realities. We are Christian and they are Muslim. We are European whereas they are Mesapotamian, and that made all the difference in the world. Inside every Iraqi isn't an American struggling to get out. Bush adopted the political correctness of the liberals, and the GOP took the hit while he rode off into the sunset. Instead of slaughtering the Iraqi army in the course of conquering Iraq, he let most of it go while striking at the head. Instead of making peace with a Syria he had no political capital to conquer, he kept threatening to attack it, despite the fact that a Sunni Arab regime would have been even more supportive of Iraq's Sunni Arab rebels.
They also blinded themselves to the what-ifs in the event things should turn out less amicably. Bottom line isn't that they weren't sophisticated - it's that they had tunnel vision and never bothered to think it through. And the European critics were even more retarded. If you want to bring someone around to your point of view, calling him stupid is not the way to do it. But that's Europeans for you - always short-sighted and reflexively attracted to self-defeating point-scoring at the expense of long-time allies.
I can see your point about the Bush Administration underestimating the difficulty of reforming Iraq (or deliberately underselling the reality to muster political support), but I would argue that we were strong enough to effectively do it. By the time he left office, Iraq was under control and improving.
The carpet was pulled out from under Iraq by the Obama Administration, who let Nouri al Maliki keep office after losing the election to the solidly pro-American Iyad Allawi, released all the bad guys (including the leadership of ISIS) from jail, and then totally threw Iraq to the dogs with a complete pull out. Iraq would be a very different place today if Allawi had been in charge, and Americans had maintained security - despite Assad’s best efforts. (...and if we had not destabilized the rest of the Middle East and North Africa under Obama - including the actual attack on Syria using surrogates.)
My position is that Iraq had painfully been moved to a position dramatically less threatening to the West and Israel by Bush, and that this has been completely sabotaged by Obama.
In your other post about Islam, it is true that under Sharia, different legal standards apply to different classes of people: Muslims, People of the Book (Christians, Jews and sometimes Zoroastrians), and Pagans (anyone else); Males vs. Females; Slaves vs. Free.
In practice, standards have varied widely from one time and place to another. The bottom line is that it depends on the Government. The continued existence of large Christian and Jewish communities throughout the heart of the Islamic World well into the 20th century, clearly shows that the currently popular genocidal approach is the exception rather than the rule. Yes, Islam allows genocide, but it grants huge discretion to the despotic leader (the true purpose of Islam was a design to support Muhammed’s absolute dictatorship).
It is not technically permissible for muslims to just kill non-muslims under sharia, but there are plenty of loopholes that Governments and non-governmental organizations (like al Queada or the Muslim Brotherhood) can invoke. Pakistan does it with anti-blasphemy laws which are easy to abuse, the terrorists do it by declaring wartime exceptions and assuming leadership authority.
I see the governments and the ideologies of the main terrorist groups as the current problem, exploiting the potentials for abuse in a system established to support the arbitrary dictates of a Despot (i.e able to legally bend in any direction, just as Hitler’s actions were “legal” under the structure he had put in place).
Just as Christianity has been co-opted by power hungry leftists to form of Reverend Wright’s “Church” which Obama attended, or Liberation Theology, which had Catholic priests carrying AK-47’s with guerrilla groups in Latin America; Islam has been co-opted by by power hungry leftists and dictator wanna be’s. The Muslim Brotherhood is clearly in this camp, and al Queada is an outgrowth of it.
The Islamic State is primarily a political/intelligence agency operation (Saddam’s former intel services), using Islam as their cover story. The leadership are driven by a desire for absolute power on Earth, not a spiritual desire for moral perfection. Just as with Muhammed however, the apparatus of indoctrinating the population and enforcing the dictatorship may well outlive the purposes of its founders.