THE first stop for any dignitary visiting Iraq is the sparsely furnished office of a British officer who has presided over this country’s most successful regime change. Taking control of Umm Qasr was a thankless task. This nasty little border port town of 45,000 people, home to gun-runners and bootleggers, took far longer for the allied armies to subdue than Baghdad did. When the British Army was given the job of running it, some in Whitehall suggested that a sheriff would have been a better bet than a military governor for Iraq’s answer to Dodge City. Everyone seems to have...