The mess that was Iraq policy

TrevorsDen

You may be right.

But it was Lloyd George who held British reinforcements back in the winter of 1917-18 just before the german ciounter offensive.
It was Winson Churchill who sent the Repulse and Prince of Wales of to the far east in 1942 without any fighter protection (For the recently educated, they were sunk).

The Dardenells was Winstons idea too.

Do you want me to list all the naff decisions made by wartime leaders?

How many newspaper editors actually won a war? Probably a darn sight less than those who started one.

Craig Strachan

James: "But (Bush) also deserves a ton of criticism for how badly the war was managed for two and a half years. "

And several tones more for the decision to initiate a wholly unneccessary war in the first place.

Dan

Unneccesary war? Wrong. The war was fought because Saddam Hussein did not come clean over his WMD programme. No sane leader with the responsibilities that Bush and Blair had could have acted differently.

And as Russian actions in the Caucasus now show the decision to go to war was prescient.

Augustus

In the aftermath of the fall of Saddam Hussein countless people around the world have tried to portray George W. Bush as an ignorant moron, and even that he has turned America into a quasi-Fascist state. There don't seem many left who trust him. Bush is an intelligent man, but the way the world's media have portrayed the aftermath of the Iraq war determines the way people view him. Whatever the Iraq body count is to date, it cannot compare to the mountain of corpses Saddam Hussein was responsible for. Why are the media so against Bush? Would it have been better to leave Saddam Hussein alone, and to allow him to profit from the greatest corruption racket of all time; the oil for food programme?

Critics of George Bush say that he lied about his motives for attacking Iraq. But if he hadn't believed that there were weapons of mass destruction what were his motives? Oil? Sand? Last year Putin was Time Magazine's Person of the Year, and yet Bush is hated because he rescued Iraq from terrible tyranny. The madness between the insurgent factions is blamed on Bush. The deep-seated corruption and collaboration which was present under Saddam Hussein simply came to the surface and could only be stamped out with strong measures. But the news that Iraq is eventually being cleansed of all this doesn't seem to please much of the media. Good news becomes no news. Modern Iraq is really a Middle Eastern design fault. All those tribes and clans were never a true nation, and only kept repressed by power and tyranny. Now they are learning at long last how to cooperate towards a peaceful solution.

Throughout history freedom and democracy have had to be fought for, and as long as evil prevails on earth offers of blood will be needed. Was it George Orwell who said: "People sleep easy in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf"? But then again, the media eschews heroics, and even sometimes ridicules it. Perhaps journalists today think that all wars should somehow be clean wars? It is the appeasers of tyranny, the believers of the soft, do nothing option, who are the real danger to freedom.

Malcolm Dunn

Good post Craig Strachan

TGF UKIP

Great post, Augustus, and you could also add that nobody was more surprised than Saddam that he was slung out given all the insurance premiums he had paid to the French & Russians in particular via oil contracts in western Iraq and oil allocations to persons "close to the top in the Kremlin and Elysee Palace."

As I've frequently posted previously GW, like Harry Truman, will be much more kindly treated by history than by his dimly predjudiced contemporaries.

Wilfred

Poor judgement, Malcolm Dunn.

Frank Pulley

Woodward is an arsehole who doesn't know on which side his bread is buttered. He never did and never will. He distorts history against his own country to make a fast fat buck. In my book that is treachery.

One paragraph written by Augustus is worth the whole Woodward bibliography. Woodward has an voracious taste for the fingers that feed him. One day he will choke on them - one hopes!

Verity

There was one major reason for the war, and this has been overshadowed by the bogeyman of WMD and jackanapes jumping up and down and shouting that President Bush is a stupid hick greedy warmonger.

That is, and it was never emphasized enough in my opinion, that we need a stable democracy in the Middle East pour encouragers les autres. Change takes time, and the changes so far are tiny, but telling.

Iraq is a Muslim country in the ME where women routinely drive around in their own cars and run businesses. Not that this is a news story in itself, but in the major news stories, women in Saudi Arabia couldn't help noticing Iraqi women hopping in and out of the driver's seat and even, eeeeeek! - pumping their own gas.

Drip, drip, drip, drip and the King of Saudi Arabia has put out a new law that women can drive after all. Obviously, this is a tiny example, but the idea was always to make an example of a working Islamic republic in the ME. We need an example of democracy at work, within their own environment and beliefs, in order to spread democracy in the region. I don't think Tony Blair ever understood this, but George Bush did.

Frank Pulley

Are you Dunn Michael? Then wipe you bottom and off to bed.

Craig Strachan

Wholly unnecessary? Really? Perhaps you would like to expand on your theory of how to deal with geopolitical crises, and how you would have dealt with a resurgent Stalinist tyrant whose antecedents and actions; whose refusal to accord with truce arrangements and whose disdain for repeated United Nations resolutions made him an ongoing threat to his own citizens and the rest of the world. His defiance of the West encouraged every Islamic nutter in the world to fancy his chances at attacking Western civilisation. Some of them took their chances and perpetrated atrocities for which Saddam was directly responsible. I'll bet you never managed to get the the tail on the donkey at school in those difficult IQ tests.

cuffleyburgers

The war was necessary, but Bush and Blair were naive and incompetent in how they handled the security council, they should have been much more ruthless in exposing France and Russia's so-called principled stand for the craven corruption it actually was. Chirac was the most corrupt leader of a major western nation for decades, and proper emphasis on this could have made things easier.

Once in Iraq, the inital phases of the occupation could not have been handled worse. What were they thinking of? ANd Bremer, my god.

Still, as Churchill (I think) put it " you can always rely on the Americans to do the right thing - after they have exhausted the alternatives"

The foolish mistakes have cost America a lot of kudos, but probably mostly amongst the feeble minded, ignorant or naturally america hating (such as the BBC) They have cost many lives and insane amounts of money, but with the Surge we can now hope finally that there can be an end to this and it will be a decent ending, and I too salute Bush's courage in doing that.

How typical that Bottler Brown has managed to avoid taking any of the credit for sharing in this successful policy. I yield to no man in my dislike and mistrust of B'liar, but there is no doubt that he would have supported what was clearly the only hope of bringing the thing to a successful close, and been able to reap some reward.

Brown's unfailing reverse midas touch once again...

Max Kaye

Good post Augustus.

I agree that history will look kindlier on GWB (and on Donald Rumsfeld too).

Hopefully all the operational lessons will have been learnt by the time we have a military showdown with Iran. (And that time will come).

Ray

Let's get one thing straight - it has not been the 'surge' per se that has transformed the situation in Iraq, but rather the change of strategy on the part of the US in wooing Iraq's Sunnis for a change instead of villainising them - a process helped along by mounting Sunni disgust at just how callous Al Qaeda had become in its targeting of innocent civilians.

As with Bosnia in 1995, the United States achieves its best results not when, full of righteous rhetoric, it sends in its own military to sort out a problem, but rather when it works with the grain of the local balance-of-power, rather than kicking against it. Sadly, it was a strategy that the US military failed to apply in Somalia in 1992/3, for instance - with predictable results.

As the British and the French discovered long ago when managing their huge empires, its far cheaper and much more effective to co-opt the locals to fight your wars for you than it is to try and fight them yourself.

Gavin

TrevorsDen, actually while Churchill had Repulse and Prince of Wales sent to Singapore rather than the Admiralty's preference of Sri Lanka, the fact that the two ships ended up without fighter protection was down to a) the carrier Indomitable, which was originally scheduled to go with the two ships and provide fighter cover, grounded off Jamaica while working-up, and b) the fact that the Admiral in charge didn't radio for fighter protection from Malaya despite the fact that one squadron had been allocated for defending the ships.

So Winston gets off on that one.

Charles

Can anyone confirm whether the bad tribal chiefs were not simply bought off?

Not a problem if they were, but so long as all and sundry bang on about the "surge" it will be presumed that the US answer to an insurgency is, simply, more troops. But, not that I am a student of these matters, I always thought that the British military favoured a more flexible approach.

Dirk Blade

Charles: Yes, the British government favoured a 'more flexible' approach: they gave the Sadr militia a free hand in Basra to impose their own form of justice and rule of law in return for the militias promising not to attack the British forces that withdrew from the city to the airport in December.

There's a pragmatic 'Iraqi solution to an Iraqi problem' for you.

Charles

Dirk Blade,

Take the point but our mini-surge in Helmand just seems to generate more insurgency. Though I see in yesterday's Times that our esteemed PM is threatening to pull them all out due to an argument about the re-appointment of a major drug warlord as the regional governor. Tricky fellows, these warlord sorts.

Incidentally, are you the 'Dirk Blade' of 'Hollywood Knights' fame?

Gavin

Dirk, the strategy of letting the Iraqis take on the militias (as far as they are able and willing to do so) without substantial involvement of ground forces is precisely what the US is counting on in their own strategy. Look out for the declarations of victory in the US media when the Basra example is used across the rest of Iraq. Except when the British do it, it's apparently cowardice.

If you want a 'pragmatic' and 'flexible' example of how to co-opt the tribes successfully within a temporary troop surge, look at what the British did in 1920-1 under Churchill.

It looks like Winston scores on that one as well. Churchill 1: Rumsfeld 0.

Verity

You are, nevertheless, inch by inch, beginning to see a working, normal democracy emerging in Iraq, with equal rights for all and genuine campaigning and genuine voting. Little by little, the ME must be changed from theocracies and tinpot oil dictatorships to accountability to their populations, for the safety of the world

I don't think Blair ever understood this. He understood he would get his photo on the cover of Time Magazine, standing in the Rose Garden with the President if he went along.

Paul B

Augustus, great post sir. I agree with every point you make and the replies from Verity & TGF as well.

I would add, that I believe a further benefit of the Gulf war (whose initial foundations can be traced back to President Reagans firm action & Mrs T`s support of him) is the gradual reproachment of Gadaffis Libya with the West (which sadly is receives minimal media coverage presumably not suiting those in Lime Groves agenda) Libya imo can no longer be viewed as a pariah nation (I do hope that is not an act of faith on my behalf) Gadaffi looked on and indeed was shocked and awed by what he saw. Being pragmatic and driven by self preservation-as many a dictator is-decided it made sense to on every level to cut his terroist ties and join the civilised world.

Hysteria

Verity - I agree with the general thrust of your argument - but Iraq is not the only muslim country that allows women the kind of routine activities you describe. Syria and the UAE being other examples - at opposite ends of the cultural and political spectrum of course.

Verity

Hyseria, Yes, and so does Jordan. But they are not on the TV news every night throughout the Middle East.

In addition, they were not transformed from dictatorships - i.e., the royal family of Saudi Arabia, just as a for instance - into burgeoning, working democracies before the eyes of the world. Mr Bush - with the Coalition of The Willing (I don't count Tony Blair, but obviously, I count our brave and gallant armed forces) - has proved, on TV news throughout the ME, every night, that it can be done. People have taken this in - as in the women in Saudi Arabia who suddenly got up the nerve to demand the right to drive. Saying Allah doesn't allow it doesn't work any more. The TV shows those Iraqi gals are doing just fine. Some of them wear jeans - IN THE STREET! and don't get struck by lightning!

Voting worked, too. Women voted and the earth didn't open up and swallow Iraq. A modern democracy is emerging.

Ian C

The honest supporters of the invasion of Iraq, like me and most here, will admit that too much was left to chance by the initial Rumsfeld strategy of shock and awe and insufficient planning for the peace, backed up initially by huge troop numbers. As ever in American war efforts, hubris was too much in charge. It has cost America and Bush dear.

History will prove him right and his misatkes are not long term devastating. But Rumsfeld was plainly wrong and he was Bush's appointment. So it will be right that Bush carries the can for the temporary loss of prestige and credibilty that is debilitating the wetern alliances and the USA specifically, in the aftermath. The cost is and will be signifcant if not permanent - and more to the point was so unnecessary and predictable by those close to it but unable to speak up at the time.

Craig Strachan

Frank Pulley: "Perhaps you would like to expand on your theory of how to deal with geopolitical crises, and how you would have dealt with a resurgent Stalinist tyrant(blah blah blah)"

1)There was no geopolitical crisis over Iraq until Bush initiated one. Saddam's regime was in a straightjacket, and should have been left bad enough alone.

2) Saddam may have been Stalinist but he was hardly resurgent, as is not now in dispute.

3) Pin-the-tail on the donkey is not an IQ test. It's a party game.

Gavin

Verity, I think Blair grasped the significance of replacing Saddam with a democracy, even if he was more cautious about advertising it in his pre-war rhetoric. And, bizarrely enough, Iraq had a substantive history of secularisation under previous regimes, so I'd be cautious in attributing all the progress made there in terms of women's rights and suchlike to the 2003 invasion in isolation.

Dirk Blade

Gavin: Yes, the US policy is to allow the Iraqis to take the militias on, and that's quite right. But I hope you are not arguing that such was the British *intention* in Basra? If so, you are simply mistaken. The metrics to enable a handover were not met: a nasty accommodation was made, that allowed the militias to impose their version of the rule of law upon the citizens of Basra - a rule of law quite at odds with that of the democratically-elected government in Baghdad.

It was quite the reverse: Maliki had no option. He launched Operation Charge of the Knights precisely to address the appalling situation we had bequeathed him.

MNF-I - the force commander - had to deploy the Commander's operational reserve to support the ISF. That is a *huge* deal: it is effectively conceding that the UK could not - would not - support Op COTK, so it was left to MNC-I - the US corps based in Baghdad - to plug the gap we left.

A commander does not usually deploy his reserve - the portion of the force to be used to exploit a potentially campaign-winning opportunity, or to prevent a campaign-losing reversal - without terrific pressure. He certainly would not normally do it to make good when an ally won't pull its weight. US commanders now have to factor in UK failure of will into their contingency plans: it is *that* big a deal. This is why the UK's efforts in Iraq are such a national disgrace. Expending lives does not automatically confer nobility on a cause, but US soldiers are fighting and dying to deliver capacity to the ISF: for the most part, ours have been emasculated for the sake of a quiet life in No 10.

The highest compliment a judo master can give to a pupil is "he threw me". So it is in Iraq, where our supposed brilliance at counter-insurgency has been squandered for the want of the political will to properly execute. The US are now preeminent in COIN. We might talk a good campaign, but we cannot deliver. We assume that, because our retreat from Empire resulted in nasty accommodations, that nasty accommodations are somehow the clever and sophisticated thing to do. Tell that to the Basrawis.

So I prefer to see the scoreline as Churchill-Petraeus-Odierno-Bush 1-0 UK MoD.

Charles: I'm Dirk Blade of no fame at all, and a good deal of derision.

Gavin

Dirk, please let me know what manoeuver units were in MNF-I's operational reserve this April, and when they were deployed to the streets of Basra in place of British units. Maliki jumped the British plan for his own reasons, pulling in US embedded training, artillery and air support assets when the Iraqi 1st Division were pulled in to assist the fiasco of Maliki's initial effort with the 14th Division. MoD (or more correctly MND-SE) 1: Maliki CoK plan: 0.

As for the nasty accommodations, you miss the compulsion for them on both sides; or did you think the Awakening were unconnected with the Sunni al-Queda groupings in Anbar, or the Iraqi forces disconected from SCIRI, Dawa and so forth?

Dirk Blade

Gavin: Manpower to assist the ISF was diverted from XVIII Airborne Corps. They were not 'manoeuvre units' in the formal sense - MTTs aren't - but they were drawn from XVIII Corps units assigned to the ORF.

The UK MoD could/would not authorise deploying anything from MND(SE) into Basra that would have had an effect before the US could do so. Even if the will were there - which I doubt - the delivery was not.

My deduction - it is, however, no more than that - is that there was not in April a "British plan" in any meaningful state of development to belatedly defeat the rise of the Shia militia in Basra. If there were, it clearly did not have the confidence of the Iraqi government. That we were unable to provide anything approaching a decent assistance contribution to CotK, and that the US had to divert its resources instead, strongly suggests such plan, if it existed, did so as PowerPoint slides in the mind of the J5 staff. I mean no undue disrespect to MND(SE), but I think you're over-egging the MoD's pudding if you think our efforts deserve a point here and Maliki's will and courage deserves nothing.

That CotK went to pot at first is disappointing, but certainly no cause to sneer, or to wail that it would have been fine if he'd waited until the UK MoD was ready. The Coalition exists to support the Iraqi government. If the Iraqi government sees a problem that needs addressing, in spite of the protestations that we make that we've got it all covered, it seems to me the decent thing to do would be to swallow our pride, support it, execute to success, and save the reproaches for afterwards. That is what the US did, and in a far more responsible way than the MoD.

That CotK eventually #did# deliver the effect Maliki hoped was no thanks to UK MoD. Besides, Maliki would not have needed to launch CotK had we bequeathed him a sufficiently stable security environment.

Let us see if a similar situation unfolds in Anbar. If it does - if Sunni tribal leaders start to undermine Baghdad and impose an alternative rule of law - then I'll happily criticise US cynicism. The fact remains that the US has stood beside the ISF in its areas, and not been shy of stepping in when things have needed a touch on the tiller. Whereas it looks very much like the UK govt did what was necessary to get a handover, then interpreted everything subsequently as someone else's problem.

I sat through weekly meetings in MoD last year - until I left in December - where every effort was made to downplay the success of the campaign: it was clear to me then that we lacked the will and capacity to alter the facts on the ground in Basra, so we made a determined effort to belittle US efforts in order to avoid blame when, as we suspected, they failed. We have been wrong-footed. Easy to say that with hindsight, but sometimes British sophistication is no match for simple US-style determination.

So: Revised scoreline for CotK planning and execution:

Maliki - 1 (for political will)
ISF - 1 (for staff effort in even getting forces to Basra)
UK MoD - 0 for responsiveness to allies' requirements; -5 for contribution to coalition cohesion, during and after
MNC-I - 1 for plugging the gaps; 2 for sticking by its man

Gavin

I buggered this posting up - apologies if it eventually appears twice.

Dirk, as I understand it, the XVIII Airborne Corps contribution to shoring up CotK was one company from the 82nd Airborne. If that is correct, it certainly doesn't amount to a significant diversion from the operational reserve even when the pre-existing transition teams embedded in the relevant Iraqi units and the extra FAC and artillery-spotting assets are counted. That's not a huge deal, and says nothing about the relative speed with which US and UK units were deployed to support the Iraqis. It certainly isn't an order of magnitude beyond the 150 British soldiers with transition teams embedded with Iraqi units in the second - and successful - stage of CotK.

On the speed issue, there was most certainly a British (or more correctly, MNF) plan to deal with the Sadrists in Basra, as Britush officers, Pertaeus and the US ambassador have stated - and Maliki short-circuited it for his own purposes. Maliki himself was previously the brake on confrontation with the Sadrists in 2006-7, much to the annoyance of some of the same US officers who have criticised the British. The same people were grumbling about British cowardice in 2005 and 2007; in the first instance this was temporarily silenced by battlegroup-sized all-arms operations from the UK Maysan forces, while the results of that offensive were immediately undercut by a political accomodation reached with Sadr at the behest of the US leadership in Iraq. So let's not pretend that the accomodations have simply been a product of some caricature of British Neville Chamberlainesque appeasement, when the US has adopted precisely the same approach at times. The same kind of whining was evident in 2006-7, except the MoD (God love 'em) seem to have learned something, and ensured that US reporters were embedded with British troops on operations associatied with Operation Sinbad in Basra to undercut the customary 'British cowardice' grumbling. Throughout all of this, if there has been any belittlement going on, it's been belittlement of the British forces and British strategy.

Some of this is justifiable, but to have any value criticism needs to engage with the full context - and that applies just as much to the stereotypical British olympian condescension of US COIN operations. My point about the Sunnis in Anbar is that the US has co-opted (at last) some of the local forces who were originally fighting against them, while the original buildup of the Iraqi security forces was heavily connected with other Shiite paramilitary militias. When it comes to the militas, nobody has clean hands.

And when it comes to MoD briefings, don't imagine for a moment my views are based upon them. My own cynicism about them springs from their reportage of situations I was familiar with in a uniformed capacity. So here's the final result for CotK:

Maliki : needed US and then British help to bail him out, despite not wanting either to start with. 1.
ISF: 1 for supporting Maliki when external reality compelled him to acknowledge the merits of their approach.
UK MoD: Nil. Didn't do what the critics have claimed, but they still lost the press battle. But then that had more to do with internal US opinions than reality to start with.
Churchill: 3. Did all of the troop surge, appeased local nationalism and co-opted the tribes in a fraction of the time it took the US DoD to get around to doing it.

Dirk Blade

Gavin: I suspect we're talking to ourselves now, but it's an interesting debate!

My understanding of the XVIII Corps contribution to CotK was that it amounted to around 500-600 men, including a company from 82XX. I'll defer to your figures, but the wider point stands: the US got capability to Basra from Baghdad faster than we did, and we were a LOT closer! That speaks volumes about political will and military decision-making. (XVIII Corps, contrary to more UK condescension, has a much more flexible and responsive MDMP than, say, ARRC.)

I'll agree with the revised scoreline, except I'd like to insist on my negative score for UK MoD for its contribution to coalition cohesion. This is based on long chats with UK and US acquaintences in MNC-I: we are simply no longer considered a reliable strategic partner.

I fully agree with your rating of Churchill, and your point about the time it took. However, the US DoD *did* get it right - and at a time when the MoD was still determined to play down US successes. And Churchill, like the DoD belatedly, got the ways and means right: he committed resources. That is just not going to happen in Iraq - this govt has situated its estimate.

You're right that everyone has dirty hands in such a situation. I'm not opposed to accommodation with adversaries in principle: again, it's a question of ends, ways and means. As I say, if the Anbar tribal leaders now turn round and act to undermine Baghdad by imposing their own, contrary and arbitrary rule of law, then I'll be equally critical of the US 'accommodation'. But the US had by 2006 got them on side and, more importantly, directed them towards achieving the ends of the Baghdad govt - defeating AQI, restoring a sense of Sunni buy-in etc. There is no sense that this is what happened after our (ahem) 'negotiations' in Basra. If we had recruited the militias to the ISF and used them to impose the rule of law, then that would have been acceptable. But, on the principle of 'trust - but verify', we had no such means of keeping the militias in check. The militias did not believe that we would redeploy to the streets to take them on, and they were proved correct.

If you're still in uniform, I hope you get to your pension point with your commendable loyalty to UK plc intact!

Gavin

Dirk, I'm suprised anybody is still here, but it has been an interesting debate. As for the XVIII Corps figures, I suspect some conflation of embedded fire-support and transition teams for the second wave of Iraqi units is involved. But I stand by my characterisation of the 'US units deployed due to Brit unwillingness' as mostly press hype of some selective US military sources which have form for similar ill-informed whinging in the past.

As for being a reliable strategic partner, US observers really need to consider the frames of reference they use in coalition warfare. 'Not doing it the US way immediately' does not necessarily justify the kinds of critiques I've read of the operational performance of British troops in southern Iraq in 2005-7 and 2008. The key issue here is the speed of response in Basra. There are two factors there, and the first is the critical one - namely Maliki's marginalisation and exclusion of MND-SE for his own reasons. It's clear that the characterisations made by the media in the first week of CotK did not reflect the actual position of MND-SE towards the need for and willingness to engage with an Iraqi-led confrontation with the Basran Sadrists. The next factor is the speed of the US response and the selection of US forces; those sprang from the direct personal intervention of senior US officers who went down to Basra, checked out the progress of CotK in the first couple of days and justifiably called in Iraqi reinforcements with US supporting teams. The question remains as to why it took a week for British assets (even artillery) to be utilised, but some of this comes down to the two factors above. It amounts to more than just institutionalised cowardice on the part of the MoD. They richly deserve criticism, but let's at least ensure that that criticism is proportionate, reasonable and well-informed if only to provide contrast with the MoD themselves.

As for Winnie, his success in Iraq obscures enormous political/military ructions which make the Rumsfeldian Pentagon look like a haven of dispassionate and consensual policy by comparison. At least the US went for democratisation straight away, and weren't forced into a semblance of it to select the local client regime as a concession to undercut nationalist opposition, as Winnie was in 1920. It wasn't just a question of resources, as Churchill was at the forefront of the Whitehall clique demanding a reduction in force and spending in Iraq well before the military were prepared to support it. Which is where the idea of handing it off for the RAF to police on the cheap came in. But I digress.

The level of Iraqi force involved in CotK (two divisions plus) and the western support required indicates the scale of the problem in Basra, where there was no ethnic minority to co-opt into the security forces to confront the local sectarian paramilitaries. Elsewhere the US has been able to recruit the Sunnis and Kurds, while the British historically used local christian levies. Nobody - not even the post-Petraeus US military - has managed to recruit the Sadrists elsewhere, so I'm not suprised the British had zero success doing that in Basra either. Which leaves the problem of building credible Iraqi state forces down to the approach of the Iraqi government, and until 2008 they indicated little interest in reinforcing state authority in Basra while Maliki protected the Sadrists from US military force in Baghdad and Najaf. Everything changed when Maliki changed his approach in early 2008. About time; but I don't blame the British for his preceding priorities and the manner in which they relegated Basra behind Baghdad, Baquba and Mosul for major Iraqi operations to challenge the militias.

I've been out of uniform for ages, and wasn't in long enough to do much than register suprise at the level of media ignorance of the operations I observed at first hand. I think that skepticism can legitimately be extended to the reportage of the Anglo-American bickering over Basra.

James Forsyth

Dirk and Gavin, Please keep going --this is a fascinating debate

Dirk

Gavin: Not trying to have the last word - I think we're probably quite close on most of your points, and amen to media ignorance. For what it's worth, my ex-colleagues in MNC-I corroborate the substance, if not the detail, of the media story - but you're probably right that the press exaggerates much for effect.

The US can appear precious about differences in approach, but I find it hard to blame them. By early 2008, they'd had their fill of UK 2, 3 and 4 Stars patronizing them, in defence papers and at study days, and in the UK media, about 'how to win in Iraq'. The US reached out to us massively in 2003-04, for advice and thinking, from wider COIN doctrine to TTPs for IEDs. We had significant operational and tactical influence, but we tried, from 2004 onwards, to buy it on the cheap. It took a lot of dedicated effort by some fairly senior people to alienate them!

On a narrower issue, the MNF-I-endorsed, UK-Iraqi plan to defeat the militias in Basra (the one that Maliki rejected in favour of his 'own' plan) envisaged the actual fight would not come until #August# 2008. It had to wait on capacity-building with ISF.

This strongly suggests that:

- If we waited until Mar 08 to brief what we were going to do about the militia, no adequate contingency plans, or combat power, UK or Iraqi, was in place in Dec 07 to address any resurgence of militia activity when we withdrew from Basra.

- It was also an explicit recognition that the ISF was not ready to deliver security in Dec 07.

Apart from these narrow points, it very quickly began to look like we had lost the initiative and authority. As you'll probably remember from 'principles of transitional phases' lessons, morale is crucial in any withdrawal - and, when 'fighting amongst the people', this must also address their morale and our authority with them as well as the enemy.

Easy to say with hindsight - but actually I do not think this was hard to predict.

And, if you cannot get the Sadrists to join you, you have little option, given their capacity to control the south-east, but to defeat them. They didn't believe we would, and, if Maliki hadn't forced the issue in March, they'd have had another five months to consolidate.

Thoughts - if you're still there?

Gavin

Dirk, yes, I'm still here, which I believe is a commentary on the value of this discussion as opposed to - oh, let's pick at random - the Grauniad's CiF efforts on Iraq strategy. I'm not going to apologise for the length of this response, even if I really ought to.

On UK patronisation of the US over COIN; yes, there is some truth there, but the reality is US operational tactics in 2003-5 were often counter-productive and the commentary it generated from UK officers, while undoubtedly patronising, was still largely valid criticism on the fundamental basics of COIN which should have penetrated US tactics *YEARS* before Petraeus appeared with the authority to question the institutionalised preferences of the US military. This point deserves reiterating. There was always going to be some form of insurgency in Iraq, but the US approach in the first phase was manifestly worse than the UK one, and while the UK approach benefited from several external factors (e.g. the relative lack of a sizeable Sunni minority in their areas to propel the kind of sectarian civil war the US had to deal with) the US *did* have things to learn from the UK. Acknowledging that earlier without the reflexive defensive denigration of the operational capabilities of the UK force evident throughout 2005-8 would have been more useful to the war effort.

As for the UK-Iraqi plan for Basra, my understanding was this was for July 2008, but that doesn't materially change your point. My response would be that the UK drawdown was held to the remaining mechanised/armoured brigade deployed at the end of 2007 specifically to support the eventual Iraqi effort against the militia in Basra. If the Iraqis weren't ready when the British handed over responsibility for Basra (which they weren't), retaining British control would have simply meant another six months of the existing force being mortared in their Basra bases while engaged in minor and peripheral operations that did nothing to challenge the position of the militias until Iraqi forces were ready to take on the job. The British taking on Sadr alone in Basra would do little to restore authority; all the Baswaris now complaining about how the British left them in the lurch with the militias would be the same people parading behind banners of Sadr and protesting unacceptable foreign intervention if they had taken on Sadr alone (again). Authority had already been handed over to local institutions for valid reasons of larger political strategy, but these institutions were unable and unwilling to confront the Sadrists or the other militias and criminal gangs active in southern Iraqi politics (often because they were the same people...). Superficial and perfunctory goodwill was generated amongst some local Iraqis by the periodic British offensives against the JAM in 2005-7, but absent the presence of Iraqi authorities on the ground capable of challenging the Sadrists, this never amounted to the British achieving an unchallengeable authority against the militias. Which is why the problem festered throughout 2005-7. Deploying British forces for an operation similar to CotK in December 2007 would have done nothing to change that dynamic. The British would have suffered some casualties from IEDs and small arms fire clearing the Sadrist's bases in major operations, but would have been back to square one a couple of weeks later when the Sadrists returned to their old haunts and began mortaring the British bases again. That doesn't amount to the successful re-assertion of British authority; if anything, it undermines it in favour of the militiamen who are always present to influence and control the relevant neighbourhoods, and who get to posture as the heroic resistance against imperialist invaders. Meanwhile the local politicians and government officials pick up on the unwillingness or inability of the Iraqi government to support the British and start to bend with the prevailing wind by collaborating with the militias again. Resolving this required the Iraqis themselves to confront the militias on sufficient scale to physically control their areas, and that was dependent upon Maliki's willingness to take on Sadr militarily on the scale required to achieve a decisive result. See the US experience in Sadr city in 2003-6 for a parallel example; it was a running sore for three years which was not resolved by the apparently greater willingness of the US forces to deploy force there time and time again.

The key difference in Sadr city in 2007 and Basra in 2008 was Maliki's willingness to do something substantial to confront the Sadrists. It was the UK's misfortune that this finally developed in an operation where Maliki excluded them and their plans, giving the usual suspects in the US officer corps a chance to shaft the British in the resulting press coverage in revenge for the shafting they felt the UK had been giving them previously. My point is that the resulting debate is about the media coverage of the operations involved, and not the operations themselves. As it happens the relevant media coverage reflects an ill-informed and chauvanistic factional defensiveness within some of the US officer corps, and was never an objective and valid analysis of the situation. The same may be said about preceding preceding critiques of US operations, but with less justification. Even stripped of the press hype inspired by the latent anti-Americanism which dominates much of the British and world-wide media when it comes to Iraq, British critiques of US operations in 2003-6 had more substance than the sour grapes of some US officers which were uncritically amplified by the media over Basra this spring. The current PR charm offensive by General Keane over British efforts in Basra seems to indicate that the US command appreciate the strategic value of the British as an ally regardless of the infantile squabbling which seems to have resulted from the temerity of some British officers suggesting that the US military could have anything to learn from anybody else, ever. And on the matter of responding to British critiques of US COIN tactics, those US officers involved should have taken more effort to read what the British officers such as Alwyn-Foster actually had to say for themselves before engaging in knee-jerk reactions to the way in which a credulous and uncritical media used them to confirm their own anti-American prejudices. Regardless of the short-term controversies, when it comes to actually commiting some forces in front-line combat in the GWoT (or whatever the Pentagon are calling it this week), the British are one of the few reliable allies the US have. If some US colonels and one-stars feel the British operational role is nonetheless inconsequential enough to justify petulant and ignorant criticisms, this just brings their judgement into questionable - unless they really do want to fight the GWoT without any allies at all.

Dirk Blade

Gavin: I agree with some of your points, including that much of the heat around Basra is because of media ignorance exacerbating differences of view within MNF-I.

I think that you miss an essential point: the British armed forces are traditionally good at COIN at the tactical and lower operational levels. Certainly the UK had much to teach the US in 2003-06 – although, as we couched so much of it in terms of our N Ireland-Balkans experience, there might have been ‘branding’ issues… The US forces lacked that experience, but I know first-hand the extent to which they sought UK support, and the tolerance they exercised, even when we were frankly insulting their intelligence. By 2006, they had their own experiences to learn from: who can blame them for feeling peeved when an ally with fewer than 10,000 troops on the ground comes to Baghdad to teach them COIN based on their experiences in the south, or in Kosovo, or in Londonderry. This was especially unlikely to convince sceptics when the situation in Basra in 2007 wasn't exactly that of a model, successful COIN campaign.

But, however long they took, they’ve got it now: this is no time to sit around sucking our teeth and saying “Well, we told you so, if only you’d listened to us earlier…”

More importantly, the UK government appears not to 'get' it at the operational and strategic level. The Bush administration, however belatedly, got it: Security is the first thing, morals follow on. They bit the bullet, admitted they’d made mistakes, and set about changing the facts on the ground. The UK MoD has conspicuously failed to match means to ends in delivering that security, and spent 2007 in denial about the chosen US solution, because it required, among other things, more boots, and that would not fit the UK's 'narrative' in Iraq. All the tactical brilliance at delivering low-level reconstruction and development is to nothing if the wider conditions aren't met.

Those ungrateful Basrawis might well have griped if we'd conducted a UK-only surge and relegated the ISF. But more likely that the ISF would 'step up' if they think we're bearing the burden, rather than selling them a hospital pass. Capacity-building is harder if the pupils think the master is trying to get them to do something which he lacks the interest or resolve to do himself. It is frankly chutzpah for UK defences sources to talk about how the UK 'enabled' the Iraqis to deliver this improvement.

Coincidentally, I spoke to an acquaintance back on R&R from Basra, where he is a sub-unit commander. His comment on security in Basra was that it is massively improved since last year, albeit on a knife-edge, and "all thanks to Maliki and the US, not anything the British have done."

Gavin

Dirk, in regard to the British position of 'authority' in terms of transmitting COIN experience, I agree with you and I have been quite specific that it was temporary and contingent upon the time taken before the US absorbed and applied their own lessons gained in Iraq. However, this was something the US was, frankly, very poor at doing in 2003-5 while any external criticism on the subject seemed to be greeted by an almost hysterical defensiveness (i.e. the response to Alwyn-Foster's remarks on US 'institutional racism' a couple of years ago which suddenly changed from initial blustering outrage to officially-directed calm rationality).

At the operational and strategic level, troop surges alone are not decisive, as the current reportage of increasing violence in Mosul after the US/Iraqi operations there earlier in the year indicate. They can only be decisive when they support or facilitate a substantive political settlement, although they can play a role in facilitating such a settlement. In Basra and elsewhere, that required more than just deploying more British troops to bash the JAM in combat, it required the deployment of Iraqi forces and the development of effective Iraqi institutions which could look to the Iraqi government for patrongage and protection instead of the local militas and factions which are otherwise the only alternative. As I've said, absent that critical factor, larger British military operations would have achieved nothing substantial in the long term, even in terms of security. Even now I suspect the situation in Basra will require the continuing commitment of substantial Iraqi forces to make gradual progress against the militias; CotK alone will not be decisive.

The ISF weren't going to 'step up' and do this until Maliki was willing to order them out against Sadr's forces, and, as I've said, in the 2006-7 period he deliberately did not do so while he attempted to engage the Sadrists politically. That may well have been a necessary preliminary step before any larger confrontation, but it left both the British in Basra and the US in Sadr city unable to take decisive action against them, much to annoyance of some US officers involved (although they seem to have somehow managed to avoid accusing themselves of institutional cowardice in the process). In those circumstances, I don't blame the MoD for adopting a pragmatic but superficially disreputable policy which took into account Maliki's (un)willingness to confront Sadr and the (in)capacity of the local Iraqi forces to do so at that time. In any case the policy involved accepted and implemented by MNF-I (i.e. the US military command) and not just imposed by British politicians in isolation. If any criticism can follow, it should be focused on the extent to which previous British attempts to develop and support those institutions (e.g. Operation Sinbad) failed or made limited progress, and I would actually agree with you that perception of British will in that area did play a role. But that's not what the criticism of the spring 2008 press coverage of CotK was about.

In response to the views of your contact returning from Basra, I'm sure the initiative for CotK can be attributed to Maliki, and the immediate reinforcements required to rescue the initial effort to the US forces. But I think the questions which need answering in regard to the reportage of CotK are -

1. Did Maliki exclude MND-SE and the British from the planning and deployment of CotK, and if so, why? - and
2. When did the Iraqi commanders/Maliki request British assistance, and when did the British respond? If there was a delay in response, what or who was responsible?

So far in all the coverage of the Anglo-American bickering over CotK, I have seen no evidence which actually goes any distance towards answering these points. We know Maliki jumped the British MND-SE plan for his own reasons, and then had US assistance called in. But we don't know precisely how the British were marginalised or if they refused to provide support when asked, or even if they were asked. For what it's worth, my reading is that the British were excluded by Maliki for his own reasons (possibly in regard to positioning himself and his government as strong on security and willing to confront fellow Shiite militias before the elections later this year), and then further Iraqi forces with associated supporting US units were called in by US officers on their own initiative when they discovered how badly Maliki's initial effort was going. There seems to have been a breakdown in communication and even relationships between Maliki and the British over the planning and commitment of Iraqi forces, but this was not restricted to the British alone and was even repeated with the US. It would be particularly relevant to learn why the Iraqis did not call on UK forces, or if they did, why those forces were not made immediately available even taking into account Maliki's initial decision to exclude them.

Much as I would like to attribute an excessively slow British response in point 2 to a Brownite/MoD policy of avoiding casualties in an unpopular conflict, I have so far seen no actual evidence of it. What I have seen has been the kind of ignorant and defensive criticism made by some US officers of UK operations in Iraq which has been voiced before. I think some of that does stem from the fact that the UK deployment has avoided the 2007-8 'troop surge' compelled upon the US for political reasons, and therefore the British deployment has followed the probable path of the earlier 2005-6 'build up the Iraqi forces' policy (hence the relevance to the origin of troop surge and how it originated politically outside the relevant US military commands). But while I'm sure that worked in sympathy with post-Blair Brownite prejudices to draw-down and get out of Iraq ASAP, it does not amount to the capitulation to the insurgents and the institutional cowardice that early press coverage of CotK claimed. Having said that, I would point out to the MoD that one of the primary political and diplomatic objectives of actually having British military forces in Iraq is completely undermined by the perception - inaccurate or not - that the willingness to deploy them effectively is lacking.

Dirk Blade

Gavin: We're reduced to hypotheses now, and I doubt we'll ever know the full story. (We could perhaps ask one of the British political/cultural advisors embedded in MNF-I, MNC-I and the Iraqi govt. While we're at it, we might also ask them what it was about the quality of their political/cultural analysis of the Maliki government that enabled us to be so politically/culturally marginalised...)

So I'm drawing stumps - but not without a succinct summary of my point:

However we got here, the current security situation in Basra was not the product of the deliberate policy of the British government in Dec 07. We did not bequeath a 'sufficiently safe and secure environment' to the Iraqi authorities in Dec 07: we almost certainly knew this, but we dressed it up as though we had. By the time we had accepted the error of this approach, and we had begun to plan to address the security situation in Basra, the political situation in Baghdad had changed, and our plan could not deliver a timely effect.

That represents a major failure, and our ability to learn from it will be constrained as long as we try to insist that we did the right thing all along.

Thanks for a most enjoyable exchange!

Gavin

Dirk, I'll try and keep my conclusion down to a manageable size. Fat chance, I'm afraid.

As I understand it, perhaps the best summary is Brigadier Free's comments in the Grauniad on 7 June, which frankly admitted that the UK lacked the available force to do what the US/Iraqis did in Basra in March/April, while The Times on 7 August attributed the delay in fielding British units in support to the lack of US-supplied tracker devices (I'm very skeptical about that, but it should at least be mentioned).

Having said that, the figures quoted are 900 US troops and 30,000 Iraqis. Even considering that some of the Iraqi total includes the existing Basran forces such as the 14th Division, it demonstrates the sheer size of the Iraqi commitment that Maliki made. That is the most critical factor absent from the received wisdom on the Anglo-American 'Battle of Basra'. Absent that commitment - which is similar to the scale of the Iraqi effort made elsewhere over the past eighteen months but masked by the PR narrative of the US troop surge in 2007-8 - I think the media missed the real point when they gave themselves over to the canards about British institutional cowardice made on a repetitive basis by certain US officers throughout 2005-8.

It was certainly incorrect to accept the assertion that the UK intended to do nothing about Basra, which was one of the key assumptions in the initial criticisms. However I do think the British force drawdown (including an armoured battlegroup) is questionable even after taking into consideration the reality that the presence of forces in Basra palace was doing nothing to combat the influence of the militias while giving them some easy mortar target practice for their own amusement. Withdrawing British forces from Basra was almost irrelevant pending the commitment of Iraqi forces to do the job and the political will on Maliki's part to confront Sadr; winding down the British presence below the point required to successfully support the eventual commitment of such Iraqi forces (which was planned) is inexplicable.

The delay in dealing with the militias was caused by political considerations, but not necessarily British ones, as Maliki's previous restrictions on US actions against the Sadrists indicate. Again, that needs to be understood by the media; but it won't be. Finally, CotK by itself will not resolve the problems in Basra, although it has improved the situation significantly.

IMO, the real story here is about internal US military attitudes, and not about the MoD. Now certain sections of the US military have the excuse they needed to reinforce their existing prejudices about their allies, dismiss further commentary from the British as croaking from discredited cowards, and get back to what they feel like doing operationally instead without having to waste time on further tedious distractions the presence of allies imposes on coalition warfare. Sometimes those attitudes need to be challenged, no matter how successfully they dictate the press narrative at any particular point.

Thanks for the discussion in any case.