Iraq: Future Strategic Relationship

I do not know what discussions took place between the British and American Governments about that. I have no doubt that the promise was made, and I have no doubt that it was broken with the understanding of the Americans because it coincided with the commencement of our operations in Helmand province. My hon. Friend is right to point out another example of how we always promised more than we could deliver. At the heart of those failures was the fact that Ministers, and perhaps civil servants, never truly understood the nature of military tasking and the consequent burden that the armed forces would have to bear to follow through our commitments. From Operation Telic 2 onwards, the number of British troops in multinational zone south was never sufficient for the task in hand. By May 2004, a year after the invasion, there were just 8,600 British troops in Iraq, compared with 18,000 a year before and 46,000 at the time of the invasion in March 2003. Even at those reduced levels in 2004-05, before the deployment to Helmand, our armed forces were still operating beyond the defence planning assumption set out in the 1998 strategic defence review. At the heart of the problem was the fact that the Government insisted that the budget for the armed forces was sufficient, although it was planned as a peacetime budget and we were fighting a considerable war. Our armed forces, as the Government had configured them in the 1998 strategic defence review, were not large enough for the task that the Government required of them in Iraq, and the situation deteriorated when we deployed in Helmand in 2006. As the need for more troops in the politically ““good”” war in Afghanistan grew ever more urgent, the so-called ““bad”” war in Iraq became ever more embarrassing for the Government, and the number of troops in Operation Telic dwindled further to 7,200 in May 2006 and to just 5,500 in May 2007, shortly before the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, left office. That was one year before Operation Charge of the Knights. It might have been assumed that the steady reduction in the number of the British forces occurred because the situation in Iraq was improving, but everyone in the House knows that 2006 and 2007 were the bloodiest years of the war. In the 21 months from the beginning of 2006 to the withdrawal from Basra palace in September 2007, British forces suffered 64 combat deaths, just under half of the 136 combat deaths sustained during the six years since operations began in 2003. Faced with an intensifying insurgency campaign in southern Iraq, the Government simply failed to provide the men and equipment necessary to have a chance of defeating the militants. Indeed, in late 2007, the Prime Minister came to the House and announced that there would be a further troop reduction in the following spring to below the 5,000 level that the Select Committee on Defence had been briefed was the bare minimum. Let us take a step back for a moment. Originally, Mr. Blair, when Prime Minister, was determined to hang on in Iraq to preserve our strategic relationship with the Americans, but I shall argue that our failure to provide the necessary military capacity has ended in materially damaging the very relationship that he most wanted to maintain. Most shameful was the Government's attitude towards our troops still serving in Basra. Lacking the courage to try to explain their mission to the British public, Ministers continued to send our troops to Iraq in the knowledge that their mission lacked the support of the British people. Nothing can be more dispiriting to a soldier than knowing that the sacrifices that he and his comrades are making are not appreciated by those in whose name they are being made. The mood of those deployed in Basra in 2007 was summed up by one Army captain, who told The Times:"““We didn't ask to come here…We are making incredible efforts and sacrifices. Yet sometimes it feels like our country and Government act like they wish we weren't here at all.””" I am glad that the Government appear to have learned the lessons from Basra and have made considerable efforts since to demonstrate public support for the armed forces, but the words of that captain should make every Minister hang his or her head in shame. Indeed, that is a lesson that we should take on across the whole House. The Government ran out of the political will and military capacity to do the job, which lead to our tactical failure in southern Iraq. As the Americans surged into Iraq in the first half of 2007, the British Government were looking to get out. It is extraordinary to see the difference between what we were briefed in Basra and what we were briefed in Baghdad about the likely efficacy of the surge. Those events led to our strategic failure with both the Iraqi and American Governments. What General Petraeus's chief counter-insurgency adviser described as the British"““defeat in the field in southern Iraq””" during 2006 led to our being sidelined by the Iraqi Government and the American military in Baghdad. The British contribution to the Iraqi army's Operation Charge of the Knights in March and April 2008, which succeeded in driving the Mahdi army out of Basra, was severely limited by what we had available and by the political timidity of our own Government. Prime Minister al-Maliki told The Times later that year that the ““British military doctrine”” may have been one of the reasons that prevented the spread of security. It is worth reflecting on the fact that had the British Army had the capacity and political backing to do the job that was necessary in Basra, Operation Charge of the Knights should never have been necessary. It was only necessary because we basically had to walk away and hand the city over to the Jaish al-Mahdi—JAM—militias. Although we can recover from that tactical setback relatively quickly, worse by far has been the effect on our relations with the Americans. I was a little surprised to hear the Secretary of State tell the House on Monday that relationships and confidence between the British and American militaries were as good as he claimed. I choose to put a favourable face on that, which is that both sides are doing as much as they can to repair the damage and to restore confidence. I commend him for that. I am sure that he was not misleading the House, but our American partners would welcome some candid and open frankness about some of the shortcomings of our military effort and the political backing for that effort rather than a pretence that everything in the garden is lovely. Although the Americans under General Petraeus have revolutionised their approach to counter-insurgency warfare, our armed forces were never given the capacity to undertake truly effective COIN operations, and we were therefore unable to defeat the Mahdi army. The view in Washington is that we failed in southern Iraq and that is having serious repercussions on how the Americans view our contribution in Afghanistan and on our future role as their primary ally of choice. A report currently circulating in the Ministry of Defence reveals the serious doubts in Washington about the British performance in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to one British source, the report showed:"““Britain's military ability is no longer rated as highly as we thought it was.””" The painful lessons of Iraq for the British have yet to be applied fully in Afghanistan. We are more effective at counter-insurgency than we were, but we still suffer a command chain divided between the MOD and DFID—a divide that stretches right to the heart of Government, and the further up the command chain, the more serious it is. The result is a complete lack of strategic co-ordination between the civil and military efforts. If we ask the question, ““Who is the Secretary of State for Afghanistan?””, the answer is that there is a Cabinet Committee that meets once a fortnight. We cannot conduct a war on the basis of a Cabinet Committee that meets once a fortnight. One of the things we should have understood from the tragedy of our experience in Iraq is that although we have excellent tactical effectiveness on the ground in Helmand and a brilliant campaign plan, we do not have a plan to win the war at grand strategic level. Until the Government grasp that point, we will simply be passengers in whatever the Americans decide to do. Furthermore, there is a danger that if the British Government do not significantly increase their military and civilian reconstruction commitment in Helmand in a co-ordinated fashion in early 2009, the Americans will feel compelled to take over command of Regional Command (South) and will regard subsequent improvements in the security situation as attributable to their efforts, in contrast to the perceived British failures between 2006 and 2008. So stretched is the British Army at present that even with the draw-down from Iraq, it is likely that no significant increase of British forces in Helmand will be possible, so such a scenario may be one that we have to accept. The erosion of American confidence in the British military is the greatest strategic failure of UK foreign and defence policy for decades. Enthusiasm for EU and UN initiatives is no substitute. Faith in international institutions is too often misplaced, as they all too often prove wholly ineffective. The Government continue to profess that the transatlantic alliance remains the cornerstone of British security policy, but with the election of possibly the least Atlanticist US presidency since before the second world war, and plenty of rivals for US attention elsewhere in the world, our relationship with the UK is now at its most vulnerable since the Vietnam war. That is the legacy of the Government's failure in post-invasion Iraq. We damaged our standing in the wider world by going in, even if it was the right thing to do, and damaged our relationship with the US by never having sufficient political will or military capacity to keep the promises we made to the Iraqi people and to our allies. The result is that we have taken much of the pain for none of the gain. Such is the opprobrium in which we are held by the Iraqi Government that French or German companies are winning far more contracts in Iraq than British companies. The Minister grimaces at that—I will give way to him if he would like to dispute it—but the fact is that French and German companies, alongside the Americans, are winning the lion's share of the contracts. The Government are holding this debate because they think they finally have some good news from Iraq and they want to crow about it. It is good news that Iraq is improving and that our troops will be able to come home. At least they can hold their heads up high for their achievements, but they come back knowing—as we all know—that they have been let down at almost every step of their journey to and from Iraq.