Iraq – Sunday Telegraph 15 Oct 2006
Paddy Ashdown
It is well known that military men speak bluntly – and General Sir Richard Dannatt has a reputation for being no exception to the rule. Nevertheless his recent comments look more like a case of placing large army boot into senior army mouth, than blunt soldier speak; more accidental discharge, than a well placed salvo directed at a deliberate target.
His claim that this is not news because he has said no more than others have said already, misses the point. For others to speculate that the direness of the Coalition’s position in Iraq belies the Government’s re-assurances to the contrary, is one thing. For the head of the Army to confirm it is quite another. Among other things it raises constitutional questions which General Sir Richard and the Prime Minister will need to sort out between them.
Meanwhile the truth has now been blurted into the open and needs to be addressed.
What do we do next in Iraq?
There is a view that the whole Iraq operation has been a disaster from start to finish. This is not wholly true.
In fact Donald Rumsfeld was right when he insisted that the invasion of Iraq did not have to follow the Powell doctrine of overwhelming force, but could be accomplished with a light level force using modern all arms manoeuvre warfare. The conflict phase of the Iraq war was a near copybook example of how such a war can be won.
But the reconstruction phase which followed has been a near copybook example of how the peace can be lost afterwards. It all began because the light level forces deployed to win the war proved totally inadequate to secure the peace which followed. This led to the commission of the cardinal sin in peace making – losing control of the security space after the war ends. The wholesale disbandment of the Iraqi Army and security structures, together with the institutions of the state made matters worse by leaving the coalition with too few soldiers to secure the rule of law and no-one to help them administer the state. The dismal story of the last few years in Iraq has been no more than a recitation of the litany of actions which have been necessary to try and recover the situation from those initial errors.
In state building and reconstruction, the central battle field is the battle field of public opinion. If you cannot win there, you cannot win. Foreigners cannot reconstruct a state by force against the hostility of its people. But as Sir Richard has blurted out, that is what it has come to in Iraq. I understand that a recent opinion poll conducted by the Ministry of Defence shows that, in comparison to wide spread public support for our troops in Basra at the start, well over 90% of the population now no longer see the troops there as a help and want them to leave. In these circumstances the presence of soldiers is bound to become, as Sir Richard said, part of the problem, not part of the solution.
It is not the soldiers who are to be blamed for this – though they are the ones who suffer because of it. Soldiers cannot build peace – only politicians can. In these circumstances, as we should know from Northern Ireland, the soldier’s job is to hold the ring while a political solution is found.
But no sustainable political solution has been forthcoming in Iraq, leaving the soldiers, as General Dannett has pointed out, in an extremely exposed and dangerous position.
Precipitate withdrawal – cutting and running – is not an option. The consequences for Iraq, the Middle East, the so called (and misnamed) “war on terror” and for Western and above all US power, are just too horrendous.
But we cannot leave our soldiers in a position where they are asked to do the impossible – compensate with military action (and attendant casualties) for the failure to find political solutions.
The blunt fact is that the Coalition no longer controls events in Iraq; events, in large measure, are controlling the Coalition. There may not yet be a technical civil war going on in the country, but slowly, inexorably and day by day Iraq is moving towards are more fractured and ethnically divided state than we would have found acceptable at the start. I am not sure that this can now be stopped.
But I am very sure that we will not even be able to influence and shape this process, let alone stop it, if we continue to be behind events rather than ahead of them. I have always been rather wary that a fully federal solution in Iraq would merely prove to be the prelude to the break up of the country. But that pass has now been sold. The Coalition has accepted that a federal solution is now the only option, but does not wish to get itself involved in shaping its structure or deciding where the boundaries of the federal units will fall. I am not sure we can now afford that luxury. For the future shape of Iraq is being decided day by violent day, not by politicians, but by killing and ethnic cleansing.
There must now be some question as to whether it is possible to preserve the unity of the Iraqi state. But we will stand the best chance of doing this by taking a more active role in shaping a federalised Iraq within a wider Middle Eastern settlement. One of the cardinal rules of peace making is that it is easier when you have at least the acquiescence of the neighbours and harder when you don’t. I doubt that Syria – or for that matter Iran – want a chaotic and disintegrated Iraq on their door step.
It will be neither easy nor comfortable to put together a regional settlement which includes – as it must, a solution to the question of Palestine. The US can no longer do this – but the EU can and should. For a wider regional solution, together with the creation of a sustainable federalised state in Iraq, probably now offers us the last, least worst chance of getting out of this in some dignity and relieving our hard pressed soldiers of the impossible job of trying to compensate with force for a comprehensive failure of politics.
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