Iraq: Future Strategic Relationship

We are in danger of becoming dewy-eyed over the debacle in Iraq. In this century, we have never had a serious strategy for dealing with Iraq. That was the case as we went into the war and after the war, and I fear that it is also the case today. The decision to offer UK support to the US invasion was made by the Prime Minister, pretty much alone, in Crawford, Texas in April 2002. The only thing that seemed to be on Tony Blair's mind at the time was winning influence with the United States, a strategy whose success is now rather in doubt, as we have just heard from my hon. Friend the Member for North Essex (Mr. Jenkin). There is no evidence that before the then Prime Minister went to Crawford, he sought or received any advice from the Ministry of Defence. He is reported to have gone to the chiefs on his return from the UK and said, ““Let's make a plan to support a US invasion.”” On the day of the invasion, we still had no agreement with the US on the political end state. Indeed, for the UK, the end state, according to a note from Downing street of 22 October 2002, was for Iraq to become a"““stable, united and law abiding state””." For the Americans, the end state seems to have been destroying Saddam's leadership and his supporting power base. Those are two completely different things. The fact is that we ended up in Basra only because of a decision made in the Turkish Parliament. Originally, we were to go in via Turkey, and our troops were to have been in Mosul and the Kurdish areas, which would have been a completely different proposition. We involved ourselves in an American-led invasion through a decision taken by our Prime Minister at a ranch in Texas, without reference to the people who would carry it out. We ended up taking responsibility for southern Iraq almost by accident. Once we were in, we tried desperately to find the justification for being there—that is, weapons of mass destruction. We could not do so, and we have spent all our time since trying to get out of the country. We reduced our forces as soon as possible from 46,000-odd men and women to about 15,000. At the same time, we were telling anyone who wanted to hear how great we were at counter-insurgency. Our focus was not on development or the restoration of security for Basra—security which, by the way, we were obliged to restore under the Geneva convention—but on the reduction of forces. We were also pretty complacent. I remember a friend of mine returning from a trip to Basra. He said that he had wandered around among the civilian population and realised what a big problem unemployment and the lack of fast resumption of some services would be. He said that he was amazed at the complacency that he found within the Ministry of Defence on the issue. After the start of the Shi'a insurgency and increasing militia control of Basra and Amarah, we built a new police force. I suppose that it could be argued that it made sense to go to the existing groups of armed men, but unfortunately they were the militias, so almost from the off, we took away the pre-existing structures and put in post people whose first loyalty was not to Iraq, but to their own factions. The police were really just militias in uniform. The best example of that was Basra's so-called Serious Crimes Unit, which was packed with people from the Jaish al-Mahdi—the JAM militia—who conducted their terrorist operations in police uniforms with police vehicles and weapons. They kidnapped the British CBS journalist Richard Butler last year, and they took two of our special forces people, who had to be rescued from a police station in Christmas 2006. As a senior Iraqi general was later to say, the police were, at the time, the cause of our security problem. At that point, the increasingly terrorised civilian population lost confidence in the British, but we were busy being complacent about Iran. We made no serious attempt to control the border, possibly because we did not have sufficient troops. There was easy movement of men and equipment across the border, which fed the Shi'a insurgency right across the country. Nearly all that stuff came through the UK area. From the start, we spent a lot of money on development, but as in the case of Afghanistan, we decided that it was important that the Iraqis were seen to be delivering services to the people, so we pumped the money through the provincial council in Basra. Guess what? A lot of people got rich, but services did not improve dramatically. Even today, Basrawis ask, ““What did the British do for us?”” There is little recognition of the UK's effort, although I am told that much of what we see in Basra has been done by the British. We have not got the credit for our effort. Because we had no clear strategy at that period apart from the reduction of troop numbers, we lost out to JAM. By 2006 it was JAM's laws that counted, not what the British or the Iraqi Government had to say. For example, a hospital director in Basra tells the story of a male and a female doctor who were chatting. They continued chatting as they went out into the street, just by the gate. Someone from JAM ran out and fined the man for talking to a woman to whom he was not married and who was not a relative. The following week the same thing happened, but the fine doubled. The hospital director still asks how we could have allowed JAM's law to take over. We were unable to keep control over Amarah. By August we had retreated, but that was okay because we were handing over to the Iraqi army. The base that we had left was looted by the militias. As one very senior British officer put it, there was only one serious attempt to produce a counter-insurgency plan. That was General Richard Sheriff's Operation Sinbad in late 2006. Sinbad was a brave attempt to take control of the city, but when in December 2006 the then Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Des Browne) returned to England after having been out there and being briefed on it, he is reported to have been extremely angry that the ground truth had not been getting through about the seriousness of the situation in southern Iraq and specifically in Basra. The truth of Sinbad was that General Sheriff did not have the resources that he needed or Iraqi political top cover, and the Iraqi 10th Division stationed in Basra was not ready to do the job. Sinbad failed to deal with JAM, and from that point we started to spin the situation differently—it was no longer a question of insurgency. The Government made it clear that there would be no long-term resources of the kind needed for a proper counter-insurgency operation, so the line was that it was a matter of criminality, that the militias were just common criminals, that there was no political motivation to the militias' actions and that we were dealing with Palermo, not Beirut. We said that it was a police problem, not an army problem, and certainly not a problem for a foreign Army like ours. At about the same time, the US was putting lives and money on the line. After Sinbad, we made some serious attempts to capture and kill the JAM leadership in the first half of 2007. The problem, yet again, was that that was not part of a plan. We could take things, but we could not hold anything or build anything. By this point, 90 per cent. of the violence was directed at us. Why? Because we were the only people who were challenging the militia for control of the city. The casualty rate had reached such a level that when there was an opportunity to make an accommodation with JAM, we took it because we had to. The deal was that JAM would stop killing British soldiers, if we released a load of prisoners and withdrew our forces into the airport. Suddenly, behold, peace reigned, but not for the people of Basra. JAM was in undisputed control, and its law was in force—extortion, smuggling, murder and rape. The funds from JAM's control of Basra went to pay for the insurgency in Sadr City and elsewhere in the Shi'a uprising across Iraq. In fairness, that was probably a sensible decision at the time, because we were losing a lot of troops and reconciliation seemed an obvious thing to do. But in retrospect, what have we done? Far from handing over Basra to the Iraqi authorities, as the Secretary of State said earlier, we handed it over to a murderous militia. There is a view, with which I have some sympathy, that if the people of Basra had not gone through that ghastly experience, they would not have welcomed the Iraqi Government as they did after Operation Charge of the Knights. That is a view.