A Journey (81 page)

This is not to say there was no violence in the south. There was a tragic incident in Maysan province on 24 June in which six Royal Military Police officers were killed in the town of Al Majar Al Kabir, situated to the south of Al Amarah. These were isolated attacks. But, even in early 2004, people could drive around Basra, and when the UK representative down there, Sir Hilary Synnott, came to see me on leaving his post in February 2004, he was relatively upbeat.

As Jack Straw outlined in a Commons statement on 15 July, we made it clear that as soon as Iraq was on its feet, we would be preparing to go.

We were receiving generous pledges of financial support from around the world. The Oil Trust Fund was established. ORHA was starting its work and ramping up significantly. In Baghdad the traffic was busy. Mosul and Kirkuk were generally calm. The Kurdish areas naturally felt liberated.

The point is this: we and the majority of Iraqi people wanted the same thing – Saddam out, the country helped to its feet, then us out. And a new and representative form of government.

Freezing the frame for a moment at July 2003 is absolutely of the essence in understanding what then happened. Yes, 8,000 Iraqi dead was 8,000 too many, but it was a fraction of those killed year on year by Saddam. Our losses were more than we could have wished for, but fewer than we might have had, and, in return, a nation at odds with the international community and which had started two major wars was now able to be a friend, not a foe.

The notion that what then happened was somehow the ineluctable consequence of removing Saddam is just not right. There was no popular uprising to defend Saddam. There was no outpouring of anger at the invasion. There was, in the first instance, relief and hope.

Yes, of course ORHA might have done better on the reconstruction plans, but that wasn’t the problem. We had enough money, effort and people to have rebuilt Iraq within a year of the conflict’s end.

What happened was that the security situation deteriorated. It did so in part as a result of Iraqi elements acting of their own accord, of tribal, religious and criminal groups deciding to abort the nascent democracy and to try to seize power. But the critical, extra dimension, the one which translated a difficult situation into near chaos, was the linking up of these internal dissident factions with al-Qaeda on the one hand and Iran on the other.

In the course of this, the terrorists discovered two things: if they could cause terror for ordinary Iraqis, particularly by the use of suicide bombs, the blame would fall on the coalition and the Iraqi government, not on them; and, in respect of the coalition, the pain threshold of the contributing nations losing soldiers was very, very low, and if it could be breached, then the coalition would lose heart – not the troops themselves, but the public back home. In other words, if the terrorists could cause chaos, the resulting fear and security clampdown would become a signal that the mission had failed, that the democratic experiment was misguided, and that a return to the old ways was the only path open to Iraq.

Instead of outrage at the evil acts of terror, the reaction was dismay and disillusion about the undertaking. At one level people might understand that the terrorists were the ones we should be fighting; but at another, as car bomb succeeded car bomb and soldiers died not in battle but in the wretched IED attacks, the fact of the carnage obliterated analyses of why we were there and why it mattered. The bloodshed eliminated the hope and brought, in its place, despair.

It may be that it was here that the absence of a broader coalition and the divisions in the international community played their part. But as we watch the same thing happen in Afghanistan, I am not sure that is wholly correct.

The defining moment came on 19 August in Baghdad. A lorry bomb at the UN HQ killed over twenty UN staff, including, tragically, Sergio. It was a ghastly and unforgettable day. I heard the news on holiday. I spoke to Kofi; he was in shock. I later wrote to Sergio’s partner. I felt and feel still a deep sense of personal responsibility. I had been anxious for his appointment and had pressed it on Kofi.

At the time I did not quite appreciate the full significance of the attack. It was utterly wicked. The people were defenceless civilians. They were there to help Iraq. They were there with the full backing of the international community; indeed, they
were
the international community. But it was a defining moment for other reasons. That was the point at which we should have realised that the conflict had metamorphosed into something different. It was pretty likely the work of al-Qaeda, whose chief in Iraq, al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, had entered Iraq just before the invasion. It was the moment we should have rallied international support and said: ‘We take our stand, we will not have the UN pushed out; however it began, this is now a fight against the same enemy we are fighting elsewhere and we stand together.’

Instead, the UN immediately withdrew its staff, and they didn’t return in numbers for several years. For al-Qaeda it had worked. They had eliminated the UN presence. They had sown fear rather than defiance. The bloodshed told the story of our failure to protect, not their propensity to kill the innocent.

Even then, however, in the first half of 2004, there were only thirty suicide attacks. The political progress continued. By the first half of 2005, the number had risen to two hundred. By mid-2005, the Sunni insurgency had linked up with al-Qaeda; the Iranian-backed militia started their work destabilising the south. Then they started sectarian attacks on the Sunni. Most of those who died were, of course, Iraqis, but Spain and Italy also suffered the loss of soldiers and civilians, and calls for withdrawal of their forces from their home populations grew instantly and in the end carried the day. Dutch, Danish, Japanese and soldiers of other nations were also among the victims, as were diplomats and journalists.

As US forces retaliated, so naturally people were detained, some rightly, some wrongly. In April 2004, pictures were released from Abu Ghraib prison showing American soldiers brutalising Iraqi prisoners. No doubt they were exceptional incidents, and the offenders were prosecuted. But the damage was colossal. For those always opposed to the action, the photographs were a heaven-sent opportunity to blacken the name of the US, while Al Jazeera, and others in the Arab world, used them as a symbol of American attitudes to Muslims.

Similar allegations were made against British soldiers. I did my best to protect soldiers from a witch-hunt but it was hard, and the law officers felt under huge pressure to prosecute. It was a sickening time. Of course such treatment of prisoners was totally unjustifiable and required punishment; but it was so monstrously unfair that these isolated acts of misconduct completely overwhelmed the wonderful work most soldiers were doing to help Iraq and its people.

However, all of this was used to fuel anti-Western feeling on jihadist websites and even in much of the mainstream media. I don’t think there was ever a single protest anywhere outside Iraq about the suicide attacks, or the fact that the insurgency was aimed at stopping Iraqi people deciding their own government.

The paradigm was: you invaded; it was your choice; so it’s your mess, go and clean it up. It was entirely understandable and, you might feel, justified. But it did ignore one important dimension: the mess was also visited on Iraq by external forces – al-Qaeda and militant Islam – which we were fighting everywhere. Fighting them in Iraq was not therefore a diversion from the real battle. It had become part of it.

It is this that we failed to convey. I realised very early on that we had to widen the campaign and link it up with the overall struggle. It was also where the combination of soft power and hard power mattered so much; why pushing forward on the Middle East peace process, reaching out to the moderate and modernising parts of Islam, was so critical.

The al-Qaeda leader in Iraq estimated that between 2003 and 2006 there were thousands of suicide bombs that they successfully detonated. My point is very simple: take those out of the equation and the security task would have been enormously different: tough but manageable.

In particular, as the political development of Iraq proceeded with the establishment of a proper Iraqi sovereign government in June 2004 under Ayad Allawi, a very capable and non-sectarian politician, al-Qaeda realised that the bombing campaign targeting civilians was insufficient. Then after the first proper Iraqi election, a new government was formed and al-Qaeda immediately tried to destabilise it. However, through 2005, despite it all, the majority of Iraqis came out, voted and showed that they wanted their country to stabilise. Very slowly their own capacity began to grow.

So, to deepen the conflict, in February 2006, al-Qaeda bombed the Samarra mosque, the most holy Shia site in Iraq. It was a devastating new development. It meant that now the al-Qaeda desire was to provoke sectarian violence. With courage and difficulty, senior Shia clerics called for calm. But a pattern was established: soon Shia militia groups formed inside and outside of the official forces, and carried out brutal reprisals against Sunnis. Of course, this was exactly the al-Qaeda intention. Some of the suicide bombers were Iraqis, but many weren’t, having come in over the border from outside. Some were women; one even a pregnant woman.

Up until early 2004, the south had remained relatively quiet. There were isolated incidents, and sabotage of infrastructure was an increasing problem, but the situation was more or less under control. However, Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shia cleric with strong links to Iran, was leading Shia opposition to the British ‘occupation’, and rallying support. He began openly to incite violence.

In January 2004, I visited Basra and the new police academy we established at Az Zubayr. It was a good facility and, at that point, we were reasonably confident of the loyalty of the police we were training. Basra continued to get better. But as 2004 wore on, it became clear that some Shia forces inside Iraq, and more importantly in Iran, were viewing the political progress in the south with alarm and anger. Despite al-Qaeda, despite Baathist elements in the insurgency, the truth was Iraq was going forward. There were parliamentary and provincial elections. It was tough for the people to exercise their democratic rights, but exercise them they did, and in large numbers. At that time, the voting was on pretty predictable religious and tribal lines, but there were signs of a crossover in some quarters and there was an increasing disposition to vote for people they thought would do the job. Also, the oil money, despite the terrorist attacks on the production facilities, was beginning to flow. All in all, given the total debauching of the country’s politics over three decades, and given the absence of real democracy in the region, this was a remarkable achievement.

But of course it was a huge threat and menace to all the elements that opposed the idea of a free, democratic Iraq. Curiously, they had a far clearer and more stark analysis of what was at stake than we did. If Iraq were to settle down as a reasonably well-functioning democracy, Iran would not last long in its present state. Iraqi prosperity would grow – as indeed it is now growing – and the link between living standards and systems of government would be clear. It is true that with the Shia majority in government in Iraq, Iranian influence would be easier to peddle – Saddam was indeed an obstacle to that influence – but as time has gone on (and as I always thought would happen), Iraqi Shias nonetheless regard themselves as Iraqi. When al-Sadr went away, he quickly lost support and his Iranian-backed militia were disbanded in 2007, under threat of force.

However, back in 2004, gradually at first, Basra became increasingly unstable. The first really sophisticated IEDs were used against British forces in March 2004. The first fatality from an IED was in June 2004. These deadly devices became the preferred method of the rogue militia elements attacking British forces. The more we armoured the vehicles, the more explosives they used. The view was that, in all probability, as the devices grew in sophistication and power, they were made in Iran.

Certainly Iran was behind the training and arming of the militia, who, as the time went on, became more determined to take over the south, and Basra, in particular. But many of the factions were just corrupt and criminal.

In her recent book
The Surge
, the American military historian Kimberly Kagan describes how over time al-Qaeda and Iran began to work together to unhinge the fragile democratic structures of Iraq. According to her account, by the middle of 2007, Iran was both funding and training al-Qaeda operatives. On several occasions from April through to July 2007, the Americans tried to reach out to Iran to get an accommodation. The Iranians talked happily. But their actions didn’t change.

That year saw the highest number of fatalities among the UK forces, most through IEDs. Of course, the British troops were keeping up a constant fight with the militia and hitting back hard each time they were attacked. As parts of the south were handed back to full Iraqi control, operations became more and more focused on Basra. Troops would stay in reserve in other provinces like Maysan, but in essence they were trying to deal with complex political and military challenges in the main city itself.

Back in late 2006, there was a pretty acute sense among the senior command in the army that we had done all we could in Basra. We had, in effect, entered into a modus vivendi with the governor and the militia there. The economic conditions of the people had improved, but the security situation hadn’t. The question was: were we a provocation or a support? There was an increasing opinion that it might be the former.