In those final long, hot, dog-end summer weeks of fighting in Basra last year,
the British battle group marooned in the palace found themselves with a
shortening list of reasons to die. Some were killed in efforts simply to
resupply themselves, guarding logistics convoys attempting to run the murder
mile through the city from the airport.
“Losing blokes just to resupply ourselves is a different kind of loss,” a
corporal from the beleaguered 4 Rifles garrison told me at the palace in
August. “Sometimes it feels like you lost them just to bring in a loaf of
bread or a toilet roll.”
His commanding officer was equally succinct. “Last time we did it the convoy
encountered 25 IEDs [roadside bombs],” he said of the most recent resupply
effort. “We were fixed. We didn’t have the initiative. The JAM [Jaish Al
Mahdi] see the trucks form up, they know the routes in, they know the routes
out. It’s a f***ing nightmare.”
Among the 11 dead and 43 wounded that the 550-strong unit suffered that
summer, the worst casualty rate in the shortest period of time inflicted on
any British force in Iraq, other soldiers were killed on night operations
that included the phrase “preserving national reputation” in their orders.
The last Foreign and Commonwealth Office diplomat had fled the palace months
before, leaving 4 Rifles with the invidious task of hanging on there until
Iraqi security forces were judged ready to take over control of the city.
They were a close unit who fought hard, alone and hacked it pretty well.
Aside from their esprit de corps, one thing the soldiers were not dying for
was a worthwhile cause that was part of a coherent strategy to win.
That era of hope was already long gone. By the time the last rifleman was
withdrawn safely from the palace to the airport, the city they left behind
was in a very different state from the one imagined when victorious British
troops had entered Basra in 2003.
Gang leaders from the three dominant militias of Basra had penetrated every
level of local governance, devolving it from the control of Baghdad. The
local police were utterly corrupt. Swaths of the city were no-go areas for
either coalition or Iraqi army units. Human rights were abysmal, democracy a
non-starter. Where did it all go wrong?
Britain’s military involvement in Iraq was shadowed by doubt from the very
start.
Commanders were so dubious as to the legality and wisdom of invading Iraq that
Lord Boyce, then Chief of Defence Staff, insisted that the Attorney-General
at the time, Lord Goldsmith, provide in writing unequivocal written
assurance that the invasion was lawful.
Admiral Sir Alan West, the First Sea Lord, was so unconvinced of it that he
sought private legal advice.
General Sir Michael Jackson, head of the Army, noted his misgivings with a
reported remark that he had no intention of ending up in a Hague cell next
to Slobodan Milosevic.
Despite these concerns, and worries over an exit strategy, British forces
completed their invasion in a timely and professional manner, seizing Basra
and achieving their other southern objectives on schedule.
For a time, as British soldiers patrolled the city in soft hats and berets
apparently enjoying the goodwill of locals, it seemed that the Army could
indeed hark back to its experience in Northern Ireland and Malaya to justify
its reputation as a skilled counter-insurgency force. The legend soon fell
apart.
The American-driven dismemberment of the Iraqi security forces and Baathist
apparatus had a knock-on effect upon reconstruction efforts in the south,
albeit more slowly than in Baghdad and the Sunni triangle. Chaos gradually
grew from order and support for coalition forces was eroded by the collapse
of civic amenities.
Under-resourced and with weakening political support at home, British forces
in Basra made the first of several mistakes in response to the situation
when they attempted to incorporate the city’s burgeoning Shia militias into
the local police force. Rather than undermine the strength of the militias,
they created and trained a law-enforcement body that was utterly partisan.
The power of the militias increased daily as death squads in police uniform
assassinated political rivals and enforced strict Islamic codes. By 2005
Basrawi women were being forced to don the veil. Shops selling alcohol or
music were being closed down. In one infamous incident Mahdi Army
militiamen, abetted by policemen, shot two male university students and beat
dozens of others merely for picnicking in a Basra park with women
colleagues. One of the women was filmed being stripped half-naked as a
warning. The British, their troop levels already in descent, were unwilling
and unable to intervene.
Meanwhile, the Army revealed internal problems that deeply undermined its
reputation.
Baha Musa, a Basra hotel receptionist, was killed while in British detention
in September 2003. His body had 93 injuries concurrent with protracted
beating and asphyxiation. His death suggested that some British units
deployed to Iraq had little clue as to what sort of values they were
supposed to export with them or lacked the discipline and training to
prevent themselves from conducting atrocities.
“This was not a case of misjudgment in the heat of battle or the heat of the
moment,” General Sir Richard Dannatt, Chief of General Staff, remarked at
the conclusion last year of a court martial of men alleged to be involved in
Mr Musa’s death. “Nobody who knows anything about the facts has ever
suggested that it was.”
No one has been convicted for the killing. One man, Corporal Payne, was
convicted on the lesser charge of inhuman treatment of persons protected by
the Geneva Conventions.
Investigators were accused by some officers of launching a witch-hunt while
many of those allegedly involved in Mr Musa’s killing preferred to close
ranks and keep silent.
Whatever the military’s failings, there was little attempt by the British
Government to capitalise on the Army’s strengths in southern Iraq.
British soldiers were still dying in thinly armoured “Snatch” Land Rovers last
autumn, nearly two years after the Americans had armoured all their Humvees.
There was no will to commit more troops to the situation and “Iraq” had
already become something of a dirty word in Britain.
In the meantime, America had committed thousands more soldiers to a surge in
Baghdad, a successful gambit that went hand in hand with the rewriting of
the US Army’s counter-insurgency doctrine by their dynamic commander,
General David Petraeus.
The British Army was never resourced or enabled to match these doctrinal and
practical advances. A mini-surge by the British, called Operation Sinbad,
did temporarily check the ascent of the al-Mahdi Army in Basra last spring.
It laid some of the ground for a handover to Iraqi units, but without
reinforcements its successes were quickly reversed and the violence
increased once more.
Painfully aware that the Army was now more of an antagonistic influence on
Basra than a palliative one, and that it was clearly unable to fight
simultaneous campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was little other
option but for the British to draw up their plans to pull back from Basra
Palace to a final overwatch position at the airport.
By the time this penultimate chapter occurred, a generation of British
soldiers had emerged from the Iraq experience battle-hardened and cynical.
They are aware that the demands placed upon them were seldom matched by
support from the Government, which had committed them to an unpopular and
ultimately futile war. The sense of vestigial anger within the Army will
unlikely be appeased in Afghanistan, where they face a different set of
challenges but labour under a similar set of shortfalls, directed by a
political strategy that remains at best opaque.
However history finally records the British Army’s involvement in Iraq, the
question “What was it all for?” seems certain to haunt the dreams of
thousands of veterans for years to come.
Word for word
“[British troops] will stay there as long as it takes to provide the necessary
security to people in and around Basrah.”
Geoff Hoon, Downing Street lobby briefing, April 7, 2003
