Mick Hartley

There’s a report in the Times on the approaching handover of security in Basra to the Iraqi authorities:

The British drawdown — troop levels are due to shrink to 5,000 from 5,500 by December — is in stark contrast to the US surge of an extra 28,000 troops in and around Baghdad, which is aimed at combating sectarian violence and al-Qaeda attacks.

British officers are quick to emphasise that the Shia-dominated south lacks the internecine tensions found in central Iraq. About 90 per cent of the violence is directed against British forces, they say, while the rest is a mixture of mafia-style gangsterism and “ordinary decent crime”. Their belief is that once Britain is removed from the equation, rival Shia militias, tribes and political parties are expected to settle down together after a brief power struggle. Commanders reject the fears of some local people that their city will descend into anarchy without a British presence.

“British troops aren’t working down here. Not because of mass, not because of courage, not because of equipment but because we are the wrong tool for the job,” a senior British officer said. “The problems down here are political. They are social. Basra has got to sort itself out.” […]

Much has changed for British troops since they arrived in the hot, oil-rich south in 2003 with high hopes of installing democratic rule, building a new security force and funding life-changing reconstruction projects as the second-biggest coalition power in Iraq behind the US.

At first they were welcomed with open arms. Pictures of British soldiers in soft hats interacting with local civilians were envied by the US military as it battled against an increasingly ugly insurgency in and around Baghdad. But somewhere during the past four years Britain has lost its magic touch.

Shia militias, such as al-Mahdi Army, have infiltrated the police and army, effectively controlling parts of Basra where the British no longer have a presence. Oil smuggling and political corruption are widespread, while the locals believe that basic services remain poor at best.

Such problems and the perceived inability of Britain to fix them created an increasingly hostile environment for British Forces to operate in, further limiting their effectiveness.

“We had great hopes for wonderful things to happen when the coalition arrived,” Munadil Abdul Khanjer, a provincial councillor and chairman of the council’s economics committee, said. “We thought they would change Iraq into another Japan or Germany,” he added. “But in 2005 the point of view of the citizens changed towards the British troops and people started to see them as an occupying force, not heroes coming in to help.”

British officers concede that some aspirations had been unrealistic, but insist that massive strides were made, namely training the Iraqi Army and police as well as helping Basra to hold democratic elections to form the Provincial Council.

Having just finished reading Rory Stewart’s excellent “Occupational Hazards“, I’d say all this rings true. In fact if Stewart were to read this report, he might manage a rueful smile. When he returned in March 2005, some nine months after the end of his time in Maysan and Dhi Qar – the provinces to the immediate north of Basra – the British military men he encountered believed they were the first ones to attempt any kind of serious reconstruction work, and were openly contemptuous of the earlier efforts of Stewart and his civilian team in trying to unite the disparate warring factions. Stewart had expressed his surprise at the new Sadrist Governor of Maysan – an Islamist, with probable Iranian connections, who’d been involved in mortar attacks on Stewart’s headquarters the previous year, a man openly contemptuous of the Coalition. Yet here was the British Army expressing their support for him:

“He is sincere,” said the colonel. His Iraqi interpreter nodded emphatically. “I know why you are being critical. It is because your council has gone – a council of decrepit sheikhs and clerics who stole hundreds of thousands of dollars, like Sheikh Rahim.”

“Sheikh Rahim defended us against the crowd when this group and this new governor were firing mortars at us. This party wants to drive us out.”

“And we are quite happy to go if they want us to leave. You are just embarrassed about your council, and rightly so. Everyone knows that the council you chose in Amara was corrupt. Useless. Utterly discredited.”

Now it’s the turn of the Army to leave, tails between their legs, with their efforts condemned as ineffectual. That’s the way it goes.

Iraq was never going to be “another Japan or Germany”. It wasn’t devastated in the same sense that Japan or Germany were in 1945. The occupying powers in Iraq don’t – to put it mildly – have the same almost universal goodwill that the Allies had post-war. There’s nothing like the same international consensus that reconstruction of those broken societies was both necessary and worthwhile. On the contrary, the surrounding countries, notably Iran and Syria, are actively stirring up trouble. And any domestic support in the US or Britain is shaky at best. Plus there was never anything like the complex interplay of forces in Japan or Germany that exist in post-Saddam Iraq.

The Coalition forces don’t want to be seen as colonialists, but if they insist on leaving behind a liberal secularist democracy that’s what they would clearly have to be. Here’s what Rory Stewart writes in a 2007 epilogue:

We underestimate the power of Iraqi society. Iraqi politicians are far more intelligent and competent than we acknowledge. I learned this from Dhi Qar, where I believed the closure of our office and the passivity of the Italian troops would lead to inchoate anarchy. Yet, when I returned a year later, I found that Dhi Qar had become one of the most secure provinces in Iraq, while Maysan, where the British had fought a prolonged and bloody battle for reform, was highly unstable. The Italian policy of inaction had produced a better result because it had forced Iraqis to take responsibility for their own affairs. Dhi Qar had not become the society of which we had dreamed: the streets were dominated by Shiite militias, women who had walked confidently under Saddam Hussein now hid under black abayas and there were police checkpoints every five hundred yards on the highways. But politicians who’d previously fought were now cooperating on the provincial councils, the criminals and tribes were under control and government was functioning.

The British military, aware that they’ve become part of the problem now, not part of the solution, would, I imagine, agree with that assessment. If we’re serious about letting the Iraqis build their own society, we have to accept that it may not be the one that we would want.