To abandon Iraq would be to court disaster

25 October 2006

The key to success is to strengthen and encourage the elected Iraqi government led by Nouri al-Maliki; he has desperately serious problems. The debilitating corruption must be fought. The sectarian chaos and bloodshed are far worse than anyone who supported the overthrow of Saddam (as I did and still do) expected. Maliki needs to deal with the Shia militia who, goaded by al-Qa’eda in Iraq, have been committing horrific assaults on the Sunnis. He will probably have to make more deals with grim people like Muqtada al Sadr, the head of the Mahdi army, to get them to support a unity government, not undermine it. I acknowledge that this is easier said than done.

The Iraqi ministry of defence is crucial and it needs more attention. One critical problem is that the ministry is not paying troops on time. Men will never fight if their pay is not guaranteed. The Pentagon should be paying much more attention to that, as well as to improving the Iraqi army logistics systems — it’s not just British soldiers who don’t have the kit they need.

We need far more training of officers and NCOs. The British have re-established Al-Rustamiyah, the Iraqi Sandhurst which Britain first built in the 1920s. I visited it in 2004, and earlier this year with General Mike Jackson, and met enthusiastic young officers and their grateful parents. So far we have trained some 600 Iraqi junior officers there; it’s a successful programme which should, if anything, be increased. It’s one of the best investments we can make in the future of Iraq.

There I met Duncan Anderson, the head of war studies at Sandhurst, who was teaching at Al-Rustamiyah for six months. He is now back at Sandhurst. Like everyone who loves Iraq, he is worried about it, but he is not panicking. He points out that it took the British army four years to get its tactics right in Malaya — and then another seven years to defeat the insurgency. Similarly in Oman, there was a learning curve in the 1970s.

‘The US army and the marines have transformed themselves in the last two years,’ he says. ‘They set up their own counter-insurgency school and all officers down to platoon level pass through it. It is a far more effective force than it was in 2003.’