Our departure from Iraq ends a dismal period in our military history

Chris

Britain has been humiliated because it was there at all. We should never have been occupying someone else's country to suit America's colonial ambitions. Our troops have ended up playing the role of the Germans in an old war film.

The British government has no right and no mandate to run Iraq or Afghanistan. The people of those countries did not vote for Gordon Brown. None of them put a cross next to a labour candidate. Nobody in Britain has a right to make their decisions for them.

Richard

Most Iraqi civilians were killed by Sunni or Shia terrorists or by other Iraqi militias.
'A senior Iraqi officer laments to me the further error of excluding all officers who had been Baath party members from the army for some time after it was re-established. ‘It was a great misjudgment to think that the army owed allegiance to Saddam,'
What rubbish!! If the UK had used Baath officers we would have been accused of keeping the Nazis in power.

Portilo is just a Tory who cannot acknowledge that the US led invasion might just about turn out be beneficial to Iraq. Indeed, it might turn out to the one New Labour policy that actually worked.

Forlornehope

Perhaps one of the lessons is that no western democracy can be ruthless enough to control these countries. British or US troops would never have been allowed to behave like the Iraqi army during the Charge of the Knights. Saddam, like Tito in Yugoslavia, was keeping the lid on all sorts of feuds by sheer brute force. Afghanistan is no different.

Bickers

Richard:

Read the article again - Portillo clearly acknowledges that the US strategy is the one that's worked whilst the UK's has at best been half hearted and lacked the commitment needed to win the 'war'

gus

i am a simple man from North Carolina. i want to sincerely thank all of the British troups that stood behind us in Iraq and stand with us in Afghanistan. may your sacrifice help bring us a better and safer world. God Bless the United Kingdon!!!

Nicholas Storey

At last it is possible to comment on this topsy-turvy article! I actually recall, as the greatest mark of shame in the Iraq business, the exposure by the Independent newspaper, of the bare-faced lies (including the nicely vague and equivocal legal advice) that Blair and his cronies used to persuade the rather gullible Opposition to back Blair backing Bush in his illegal invasion of Iraq. That the UK has inadequate military might at this period in its history seems axiomatic and any shame in that is the shame of the government rather than the forces themselves - many of whom must wonder to what Great Question Britain is still seeking the answer in it presence in far-flung places which not even any continuing Empire could justify. Moreover, there is a certain shame in the toothless consensual politics of the age which means that nothing much has to be fought hard in debate and doubt before it is (often actually mindlessly) enacted by the goons in Parliament.