A city transformed

Ray

Of course, one could mention that the rules of engagement that Iraqi security forces are working to are probably, how shall we say, a bit more permissive than the human-rights-lawyers-are-watching-your-every-move ones that the British Army has had to work to.

roger

Just as we've got a nutbag commentariat thinking that dealing with Islamism is like dealing with Northern Ireland, so - for whatever reason - our military chose to operate in Iraq as they did in Northern Ireland. What's worse is it was all done with embedded BBC reporters filing reports trumpeting how good this was and how bad the Americans were. And now?

Why are we made to look so foolish at every turn from controlling our borders to military strategy in the Middle East? The sclerosis runs throughout officialdom but it operates with deliberate and poisonous purpose in the mainstream media.

I have long suspected that many in our glib and spineless media would actually enjoy failure in Iraq just so they're not made to look like fools.

John Fisher

There was a British "surge" in Basra some months before the U.S. surge across the whole of Iraq. The initial results were promising, but didn't last.

Andy

I thought that the British troops there were training the Iraqi troops? So we're having our 'surge' by proxy. Isn't that what the British public wanted all along? To save the world without any British casualties?

ACT

If James wants to take the part of the US before of that of Britain in every instance, why on earth did he bother coming back here? Was his greencard application rejected?

British military strategy, given the *political* goals it was set, is working flawlessly. When the government changed last year, the (diplomatic) desire to leave was acted upon. Which presented us with a twofold (military-cum-geopolitical) problem: 1.) our weirdly hypersensitive superpower ally would have thrown a wobbly if we had simply announced that we were going & 2.) our armed enemies in Iraq would of course have sought to take advantage of our withdrawal.

As it is, having decided to withdraw, we've done in a way that has killed remarkably few of our troops, and, perhaps even more remarkably during a US general election year, caused Washington not to wet the bed.

You might disagree about whether or not we should have decided to leave Iraq, but since we have, we've, as a matter of both foreign policy and military logistics, done it superbly well.

TrevorH

Sadly you cannot make an omlette without breaking eggs. Retaking the Falklands cost 258 lives. That was comparitavly a small undertaking.

This British government had no stomach for the losses necessary to pursue its political objectives in iraq and is not committing the recources necessary to fulfil the same in Afghanistan.

What this means is our soldiers are dying in vain. If our govt does not want to see our soldiers die - if it is not prepared to prepare the British public for that necessity and fund the 'necessary' as well, then it should not be deploying our soldiers in the first place.

As it is our mission in Iraq has failed and its the USA taking the lossed but doing the job. Likewiswe in Afghanistan now as well. Our delay and ultimate failure in Basra over a number of years has had catastrophic consequenses because really Basra should have been the economic beacon of a new Iraq, instead it has been a drag.

Dirk Blade

ACT: I see it slightly differently from you. I don't think it makes sense to divorce military planning from the wider political context, and that is the crux of James’s post.

You are right that, within the political constraints of the situation, the British forces have played a fairly straight bat. But I think you need to ask yourself whether the military capability in Iraq was decided by the political aims; or whether the political aims were fitted around the reluctance to allocate more resources. The British government was never going to commit and sustain a surge in Basra, so it tried to play the ‘soft power’ card instead. Fair enough. But soft power works only if you’ve got the hard power to back it up, and the political guts to use it. Our deficit in the latter ensured a deficit in the former.

In Basra 2006-07 we did *not* create the conditions for a successful disengagement, but our metrics were structured to suggest that we *had*. The various militias were not deprived of their freedom of action to any meaningful extent, and they did indeed take advantage of our withdrawl. Moreover, the militias and their Iranian proxies could make an intelligent guess that, once we'd gone, we would not be back; and that Maliki would not dare to take on his co-religionists. They were right about the former, sadly - ‘overwatch’ is a dismal fiction; but wrong about the latter, fortunately. That it took ‘the pupil’ to show ‘the master’ how to deliver security and assert the rule of law compounds our failures.

Say what you like about the US – although you somewhat undermine your points by calling justifiable concerns about apparently divergent security aims that created a serious weakness in coalition cohesion ‘bed-wetting’ – but it is a serious superpower. It had the will to change the facts on the ground, rather than let them be dictated by the opponents of the democratic government in Baghdad. We opted to accommodate the militias, and in doing so undermine the rule of the Baghdad government. Neither Maliki nor the Coalition leadership have any reason to be grateful for our conduct, and much reason to be resentful.

It is far from clear that our precipitate abandonment of Basra is 'superb' foreign policy. CGS himself is clear that Iran is and has always been the real threat in the region. So why has our policy left a gaping Iraq-Iran border and given Iran-backed militia a free reign? And Mr Brown's blithe announcements of withdrawals, whether or not it was double-accounting, telegraphed exactly the British govt's commitment, to the militias, to the Baghdad govt, to the US and to Iran. That's not great foreign policy.

I'd go further and say that, by selling Mr Maliki a hospital pass, we have done our reputation as an ally serious harm, and set a pretty poor precedent for our commitment to Afghanistan. When the going gets tough, the Brits sit on an airfield. That's not good foreign policy.

Andrew Spencer

umm ACT, we haven't actually withdrawn, we still have 4,000 troops there who do not appear to be doing a great deal.

The Americans are pretty upset about our performance in and withdrawal from southern Iraq. McCain has publicly criticised it, as have any number of US generals. The Dems don't mind too much, of course, becuase both their candidates want to get out of Iraq as quickly as possible, but if you don;t think this whole iraq episode, particualrly the last 18 months, hasn't damaged our relationship with the US then I fear you're mistaken.

If you think we've managed the withdrawal superbly well as a matter of military logistics, I suggest you check what has actually happened. The Pm told the House in October that we would draw down from 5500 to 2500 by Spring this year, thus raising the hopes of servicemen and their families only to dash them. We are now stuck at 4,000 for the foreseeable future. This was a timetable drawn up for political purposes which is why it has fallen apart.

Andrew Spencer

James,
a British surge in Basra last year might have achieved much but it might also have stirred up the Mahdi Army (JAM) before we or the iraqi Army was ready to deal with them. Part of the reason for the success of the Surge in Baghdad was because the JAM was on ceasefire. One doubts if it would have achieved so much had the Americans had to fight both AQI and the JAM simulteanusly in and around Baghdad. This is a matter of picking off your enemies one by one. First AQI, then the JAM.