BRITAIN should be so lucky. A top general grilled on the Iraq war by skeptical representatives of the people. An ambassador summoned to explain his policy before the cameras. Three detailed reports challenging the official line submitted to Congress. A nation in a ferment of debate.
Americans may have blundered into the Iraq morass, but they will retreat from it with political guns blazing.
And Britain? Its new prime minister crosses the pond to receive private instructions from the White House, allegedly to delay Iraq withdrawal by five months, and returns to sullen acquiescence. Two-thirds of Britons no longer support their government’s policy, but do their representatives care? Is parliament even sitting? No. From the moment of the invasion of Iraq, the Commons has shown as much spine as a colonial legislature under the empire. Whipped, bribed, deceived and ignored, the UK Parliament has been useless. When it comes to executive scrutiny, thank goodness for the press.
The irony is that as this reckless and bloody escapade approaches its endgame, Britain at least has a plausible exit strategy. It may be driven in part by an eagerness to plunge into a near-identical trap in Afghanistan, but last winter the strategy was to begin withdrawal in the spring. There was no longer scope for progress on the ground. British troops could no longer protect anybody, not even their own interpreters. They could not guard infrastructure. They might raid hostile police stations and capture arms dumps, but in that sense they were just another militia.
Meanwhile Basra is apparently as poor a place to live and as insecure as it was under Saddam Hussein. Whatever training was offered to the local army and police was vitiated by the fact that British support would end and power would pass to whichever militia had the upper hand. Patrols merely offered target practice to insurgents and their murky backers in Iran. Britain did not, in any sense, “own the ground” in the south, and its presence was as senseless and costly as trench warfare on the Somme.
In the event, that realistic strategy was trumped by politics. Fierce US pressure on Tony Blair and Gordon Brown secured a postponement of Britain’s retreat even from its besieged fortress at Basra palace. Six months later, leaks from the army chief, Richard Dannatt, and other generals indicated that another 40 dead British soldiers, just to keep the White House happy, was enough and withdrawal to the airport base took place.
The withdrawal was handled with aplomb. Negotiations with the militia commanders involving prisoner release secured pledges of safe conduct for the retreating column and a “modus vivendi” with Iraqi Army units left behind. The feuding groups in Basra and its surrounding provinces were left to sort out their differences and order their security and governance unaided by an occupying power. They appear to be doing this without the widely predicted explosion into civil conflict.
We shall never know if such laissez-faire might have worked as well, if not better, four years ago, when secular institutions were being put in place and infrastructure slowly restored. We shall never know whether the initial British approach, dealing with sheikhs and Shiite brigade commanders, might have brought an early stability had the Americans not turned central Iraq into a recruiting ground for Al-Qaeda and the Mahdi Army. All we know is that by early 2004, Mahdists were already infiltrating the south and inducing Iran to increase its support for the rival Badr Brigades. At that point, the plot was lost.
Blair never demanded that Washington stop wrecking any chance of success from the intervention on pain of his withdrawal from the coalition. He never demanded a change in strategy, yet never sent enough troops to garrison the towns of the south. He let the Pentagon lead his army down a road that former chief Gen. Sir Michael Jackson said, at the time and since, led only to defeat.
Blair duly colluded in a humiliation from which his successor must extricate himself. Britain’s stance is to support the US by not leaving Iraq completely but no longer exerting any leverage there. This avoids an open breach with an ally while removing troops until only a token presence remains. For Britain, the Iraq adventure is effectively over.
In Washington this week, Gen. David Petraeus has been unable to offer his nation any similar comfort. The well-publicized respite offered by the mass policing of suburban Baghdad has given George Bush nothing but time.
Everyone knows such respite, if 678 dead Americans and 16,000 dead Iraqis since February is a respite, means nothing when its gains cannot be embedded politically. But time is the most precious political commodity. Petraeus has promised to end his surge next year, leaving Bush just six months to hold at bay the shame of failure.
The surge relies heavily on the ghettoization of Baghdad, creating 2 million internally displaced people. It also relies on arming Sunni militias against Al-Qaeda cells — which would have been wise policy four years ago.
Nothing here lessens the scope for a return to civil conflict when, as Petraeus has had to promise Congress, 30,000 troops are recalled next summer. Indeed, by continuing the separation of the clans into cantons, the surge must increase the likelihood of conflict as well as make harder a withdrawal which, as in the south, must occur soon if Iraq is to find its own way to salvation.
The Iraqi government is now propped up by corruption and US protection, and has no interest in another supposed reconciliation with de facto separatist Sunnis. Nor have the implications of Kurdish autonomy been addressed. Does the US really want to police the competing claims to Kirkuk’s oilfields and Kurdistan’s border with Turkey? Does it want to sponsor another Israel? Does it really intend to stay indefinitely in the hope of “doing” some undefined “job”?
Iraq is not a military war. It is anarchy, order suspended through a hamfisted intervention in another country’s affairs. The country needs help, but cannot possibly use it as long as the landscape is one of bombs, bullets, militias, refugees, gangsters, thieves and assassins, today’s accompaniments of what is cynically called “liberal intervention”. Any fool can create a wilderness and call it peace.
Petraeus’s gains do not hasten peace, they only postpone it.
