Those of us who, like me, supported the removal of Saddam Hussein by force, now have to face up to the awkward task of deciding what can be salvaged from this mess. Which is what the new Iraq study group chaired by Tom King, Margaret Jay and I will undertake under the Television cameras of Channel 4 starting on XXX.
The tragedy is that the military invasion of Iraq was not a failure – it was a success. But what happened afterwards has been a copybook of how to make a mess of the peace that follows. It didn’t have to be like this. And perhaps it wouldn’t have been if only those responsible had not been so determined to ignore the lessons of the past.
In 2003, the US administration, aware that there might be were lessons to be learnt, especially from the rebuilding of Germany after World War Two, convened historians to Washington to help spell them out. One was Dr Helmut Trotnow a leading expert on the occupation of Germany. He later discovered that all the recommendations made at the conference were completely ignored by the US war planners.
The allies ran Germany for four years from 1945 to 1949. In that period, the rule of law was re-established, human rights respected, robust democratic institutions created and the foundations of Europe’s strongest economy, laid. Much of this happened despite some spectacular blunders in the early days, many of which have been repeated in Iraq.
The allies in 1945 planned to remove 180,000 officials from their posts. But they soon discovered that if they did, they would have no-one to run the state. It was largely an accident that this denazification policy was reversed. The western allies gradually came to realise that the future threat came from Russia, not Germany, and that the Germans were essential allies against that threat. Former membership of the Nazi party ceased to be a barrier. Germany’s second President was a former member of the Nazi Party.
The situation which the coalition found in Iraq was similar. Most of those responsible for running the country were members of the Ba’ath party. Yet, ignoring the early fiasco of denazification in Germany, the Coalition proceeded to purge all the Ba’athists from their posts. And then found, as in Germany, they were left with no-one to run the state and its services.
Then there was the similarly disastrous decision to disband the entire Iraqi army. Here, the coalition did not have to look as far back as Germany. In most more recent international interventions, the soldiers of the defeated army had been given a month’s salary, and then either reintegrated into a reformed army or helped to find a job in civilian life. But in Iraq, the army was peremptorily dissolved, leaving the Coalition with too few soldiers to maintain security and abolishing at a stroke, both the status and the income of an officer corps which numbered 25,000 above the rank of Colonel. For them, joining the insurgency became a very attractive option and that is where many ended up.
One of the ironies of the post war German experience was that it was the US who were the most enlightened and the British and the French the most reactionary. The US military had no truck with the ridiculous instructions of General Montgomery to British troops not to speak to any Germans. The Americans were the first to realise that the policy of dismantling German industry was a mistake; in the interests of lasting peace, it was far better to help to build it up. The British and French held on to counterproductive, even colonialist notions of punishing the Germans far longer, partly in order to protect their own industries from German competition. In the coalition in Iraq, by contrast, the Americans have proved by far the least sensitive to the local population.
International intervention has, since the end of the Cold War, halved the number of wars in the world and reduced the number of war casualties by even more. But success depends on following basic rules which were systematically ignored in Iraq. Plan even harder for peace than for war; you will probably need more troops to provide security after the war than you needed to win it; make the most of the “golden hour” after the war ends; creating security should be the first priority; you may have to remove those at the top of the old regime, but you will need the rest to run the state work with the local population and its traditions; you need the help of the neighbours – one of the big mistakes over Iraq was to make enemies of Iran and Syria.
Finally, you are more likely to succeed if you replicate what succeeded in the past, rather than repeating what failed.
806 words