Cover Story

A bittersweet birthday

18 March 2006

On 20 March, the Iraq conflict reaches its third anniversary. Con Coughlin defends the decision to invade, explores the impact of Blair on Bush’s second term — and reveals what Condoleezza Rice thinks of David Cameron

And yet now we are told that the US-led coalition was so riven with arguments and disputes about how to prosecute the war that General Tommy Franks, the commander of the US-led invading force, nearly fired one of his leading generals within the first week of hostilities commencing.

This particular dispute was over how the Coalition should deal with the thousands of Fedayeen paramilitary fighters whom the invading army encountered as it launched its blitzkrieg on Saddam’s regime. General William ‘Scott’ Wallace, who was leading the army troops towards Baghdad, wanted to delay the advance to suppress the Fedayeen threat in the rear.

Franks was adamant that nothing should impede the advance on Baghdad and the key objective of overthrowing Saddam’s regime. Once that had been achieved, the Coalition could concentrate its energies on mopping up the Fedayeen remnants, who would anyway pose less of a threat once Saddam’s regime had suffered a humiliating defeat.

Wallace’s supporters — drawn mainly from the usual anti-war suspects — would now have us believe that Franks’s failure to deal adequately with the Fedayeen threat during the opening engagements of the war was responsible for the bloody insurgency that has severely hampered the Coalition’s subsequent attempts to return Iraq to some semblance of normality.

Well, this is one argument that does not bear serious scrutiny. The pressure on Franks, and indeed the entire Coalition, to achieve a rapid victory was immense. When the advance on Baghdad was halted for a mere 48 hours to enable frontline units to resupply, the 24-hour news industry and professional doom-mongers such as Robert Fisk gleefully reported that the entire mission was on the brink of disaster. The military campaign was a war against Saddam and his inner circle, not the Iraqi people, and the sooner that objective was achieved the more likely it was that the fighting would stop.

I was in Baghdad shortly after the end of the war, and if it had been possible to conduct an immediate plebiscite of the Iraqi nation, it would have shown that about 99.9 per cent of the population — the same percentage victory Saddam used to claim in his presidential elections — was grateful for its liberation. The same percentage, it should also be said, would have registered their distaste at having their country occupied by a foreign power.