They have been beating retreat at Basra airfield this week as the British hand over command to the Americans for the next two years. This marks the end of the latest British military promenade into Mesopotamia and Iraq, the fourth in under a century — and, presumably, British troops will not be coming this way again in a hurry.
The present contingent of 4,100 leaves by the end of July, with only a 400 staying on till 2011, to help with training some Iraqi Army units and the police.
British commanders this week were keen to put a high gloss on what had been achieved in the past six years since British troops went in “shoulder to shoulder” with their American allies in George Bush and Tony Blair’s great adventure to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
In those six years, 175 British lives have been lost in combat operations and many times that number wounded physically and psychologically. It has cost the British taxpayer well over 10 billion pounds, and bills for damaged and lost lives — not to mention, an army with its equipment and operational capability run ragged — will have to be met for years to come.
How we got into the 21st century’s greatest war of choice so far, should be the subject of the official inquiry which the government is reluctantly setting up. However much the powers fudge it, the inquiry will have to answer the growing public disquiet that this was indeed an optional war, devised and run largely to an American script.
For two years now, the main aim has been to get the British forces out of Iraq reasonably intact, still keeping their good name and the confidence of the senior ally, America, and the Iraqi authorities. The jury is largely out still on all of these counts.
There have been continuing problems with both the Al-Maliki regime and the Americans, whose direction of travel is still in the grip of George W. Bush’s camp followers to a surprising degree. Well-known hawks like retired Gen. Jack Keane, now claiming credit as the architect of U.S. forces’ successful “surge” offensive last, say the British lost their bottle and “surrendered” the streets of Basra to the militias in 2007.
It took the Americans and the Iraqis’ own surge to get the militias off the streets in April last year in the operation known as “the Charge of the Knights”, according to the hawks and neocons’ oversimplistic narrative.
In fact, nothing of the kind was available before spring 2008. The Iraqis did not have the trained troops available for a Basra surge the year before, and besides the Americans were against it.
The war of words and spin surrounding this and other episodes — much of the Iraq operation, in fact — should give any British government and military command warning not to offer such blind support to the American military and administration on matters of war and peace as they have over Iraq, and are continuing to over strategy in Afghanistan.
The problems of Basra appeared from early on. Society imploded and carbonized into a round of destruction, looting and vendettas. The presence and power of the militias and local Shia factions were underestimated from the first.
And to the last, one might say — for much of the success of the American surge led by Gen. Petraeus has stemmed from the militias, Moqtada Sadr’s Mehdi Army in particular, applying a voluntary cease-fire until the Americans go away.
The British knew they could never take and hold a municipality of 1.5 million. They didn’t have the military manpower, the mandate locally or the political support in the UK. When the Americans realized that they faced defeat in Iraq in 2006, they doubled the resources behind their operational forces there — whereas the British proportionally were cutting back.
What did happen to the British will be raked over for years to come. There’s plenty of scope, as there still isn’t a serious analysis of the whole weird episode from a British perspective that would compare to Cobra II by Michael Gordon of the New York Times, and Fiasco by Tom Ricks of the Washington Post.
But we now have the promise, or rather half-promise, from Foreign Secretary David Miliband of an official inquiry into the Iraq operation. However, according to the Guardian, much of this is likely to be conducted behind closed doors.
Moreover, Miliband has said that it will focus on the conduct of the war, because we know sufficient about its origins through the Hutton and Butler enquiries. In other words, it will be a classic bit of spin and conjuring, of which Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell would be proud.
By concentrating on operations, it will blame the commanders and the poor bloody infantry on the ground — which everyone in Whitehall, from the marble halls of New Labour to the deep bunkers of the Treasury, the FCO and MoD love to do — and are very good at. Ministers and their advisers must be asked to account in public for how they drifted into such an ill-thought-out enterprise in Iraq in the first place.
They must also account for the string of bad decisions and poor judgments they continued to make in the years since the initial invasion in March 2003. The present mood of buck passing and shoulder shrugging about Iraq bodes ill for future policy-making about Afghanistan — and wherever else British forces may be called to act.
If our Parliament and politicians aren’t up to putting the decision-makers under the necessary scrutiny, others may well do it. After all, we do now have, at least in name, the Freedom of Information Act, and the spin doctors and censors of Westminster and Whitehall will find it hard to defeat the growing momentum for debate and inquiry in the blogosphere about the New Labour record on war and truth.
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