A bloody waste

The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was an act of frivolity without parallel in United States history. The destruction of the Baathist state caused Iraqis to flee into their ancient sectarian and racial communities, and laid out a killing-ground where animosities suppressed in other Muslim countries could be fought out to the last Iraqi. By early 2006, when Sunni extremists (usually called al-Qa’eda) blew up the holy Shia mosque in Samarra, the country was in civil war.

The United States kept its nerve. With the dogged support of President George W. Bush in Washington, five additional fighting brigades and uncounted tons of reinforced concrete, Generals David H. Petraeus and Raymond T. Odierno separated and broke up the insurgents, stabilised the country, warned off the Iranians and retrieved the honour of the United States armed forces. The Endgame, a long book by two New York Times writers, tells the story in great detail, from White House conferences to a single tank firing canister-shot down the alleys of Baqubah to cut the cat’s cradle of wires linked to buried bombs and booby-trapped houses.

British readers will contrast the vigour and grit of the US forces with the inaction of the British contingent in the south of the country, which withdrew from Basra till it was shamed back into the town in early 2008 by the chaotic Iraqi army action known as ‘the Charge of the Knights’ (soulat al-forsan in Arabic).

In invading Iraq, the Bush administration imagined it could remove Saddam Hussein and the most repellent of his Baathi friends, but leave the 80-year-old state intact. When that state disintegrated, a succession of proconsuls tried to rebuild government, army and police from the ground up. Yet the training missions and development programmes merely reinforced the Shia cliques and drove the terrified Sunni minority into the arms of al-Qa’eda.