Why Blair and Bush should have known Iraq would be a disaster

[Errigal]

Why Blair and Bush should have known Iraq would be a disaster
By Correlli Barnett
18th August 2007

Five long years ago this month, before the Iraq war, I warned in an article in this newspaper that if Bush and Blair were to attack Saddam Hussein, then Britain and America would become entangled in a protracted guerilla war, and "suffer a constant drip of casualties".

I predicted that every American airstrike on civilians, whether deliberate or "collateral", would prove a propaganda gift to the Iraqi resistance, "with global TV carrying pictures of Iraqi women, children and old people dead in their ruined homes or maimed in hospital beds".

And I was certain that, in consequence, "body-bag anti-Bush disillusionment" would grow within the U.S. and world opinion would "react to the human suffering and regional instability caused by the American aggression".

Just three weeks after I wrote this article, Tony Blair published the now notorious "dodgy dossier" - unscrupulously sexing up the very scanty available intelligence about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction - intended to persuade public opinion that Saddam must be toppled from power, by force if necessary.

In fact, Bush and Blair had already secretly decided on going to war.
It is therefore clear that the grim scenario of protracted conflict I outlined did not feature at all in the minds of Bush and Blair and their advisers.
How was it that a military historian without access to current secret intelligence could accurately predict what would happen (and I am deeply sorry to have been proved right), whereas Bush and Blair and their elaborate intelligence apparatus could make such a catastrophically wrong judgment?

This question is still deeply relevant, because it relates to the soundness of any strategic judgments now being made by London and Washington - for example, about Iran and her alleged nuclear bomb programme, or her supposed support of the insurgency in Iraq, or the threat she allegedly poses to the stability of the Middle East.

There is one simple reason why I, as a historian, got it right in 2002 with regard to the consequences of an Anglo-American invasion of Iraq.

It is that I had studied previous military interventions which had all begun in sure hope of quick and final success, only to end in protracted fighting and ultimate disaster.

The classic example is Napoleon in Spain during the Peninsular War. In 1808, at the head of the Grande Armee, the most formidable fighting machine of the era, Napoleon swiftly smashed the Spanish army, entered Madrid, toppled the existing monarchy and installed his brother, Jerome, as king.

"Shock and awe" and "regime change" indeed!
But the French occupation ignited the patriotic fury of the Spanish people.
Soon, a protracted war of ambush and assassination by guerillas against the French army began - a war supported by British forces under Sir Arthur Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington).

With the French spread out across the country vainly trying to crush the insurgency, Wellesley defeated their weakened field army in the battles of Salamanca and Vittoria, and, in 1813, finally drove it out of Spain.

The pattern of the French disaster in Spain was broadly repeated by the Americans in Vietnam after 1967, when an American army 541,000 strong failed to crush the Vietcong insurgency supported by the communist government in the North.

As American casualties mounted and American frontline morale sank, Washington finally had to acknowledge the reality of failure, and the American forces were withdrawn in 1973.

However, Bush and Blair - both ignorant of military history - couldn't care less about its lessons and, anyway, were pigheadedly determined on war against Saddam out of sheer ideological zealotry.

Remember, Bush believes that Jesus Christ wanted him to spread democracy round the world, while Blair stated that he was "accountable only to God" for his warlike decisions.

Yet Bush also got it wrong for another reason. His military guru, Donald Rumsfeld, the then U.S. Secretary for Defence, that America's amazing high-tech military capability rendered the lessons of history irrelevant.
Why take note of Napoleon's fate in Spain when you have command and control by computer network; you have satellite surveillance and target acquisition; cruise missiles with pinpoint accuracy, and stunning firepower on land, sea and air?

And Bush got it wrong in yet another way because influential neocon advisers such as Paul Wolfowitz (then deputy U.S. Defence Secretary) were certain the fall of Saddam would be followed by the spontaneous emergence of Iraqi democracy, which in turn would allow a rapid run-down of the American occupation forces.

So what lessons do historical examples such as Napoleon's campaign in Spain or America's intervention in Vietnam teach us with regard to our present and future strategy in Iraq?

The first lesson is that we should admit that Britain and the United States have decisively failed to achieve the objectives agreed by Bush and Blair five years ago.

Instead of the hoped-for strong democracy ruling a peaceful, prosperous, and unified Iraq, we have created a failed state with a feeble and faction-ridden government, and a country driven by ferocious communal violence.

This week witnessed the worst terrorist outrage since the Anglo-American invasion, with more than 250 men, women and children killed by four car bombs.

Although the American occupation force has now swollen to 165,000, it is failing to crush the insurgency, while the tally of American body-bags now stands at nearly 3,600, with more than 27,000 wounded.

Our own garrison troops in Iraq, far from acting as a stabilising force welcomed by the local population, are now subject to increasingly lethal ambush while on patrol and to sporadic bombardment while inside their fortress bases.

They are indeed, as General Sir Richard Dannatt (Chief of the General Staff) has said, now part of the problem.

Back in 2002, I wrote that an eventual military and political stalemate in Iraq would ultimately constitute a victory for the Iraqi resistance.
That stalemate has surely come about.

So now, more than ever before, it is time to heed the Duke of Wellington's dictum that the real test of a general was to know when to retreat and dare to do it.

Will our new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, pass this test?

He has spoken of our duties and responsibilities in Iraq, but surely the overriding duty and responsibility of a British prime minister must be to the British people and our valiant servicemen and women.

As he ponders what course to take, Brown could do worse than learn from the example of Clem Attlee's post-war Labour government when it was faced with the intractable problem of the future of India after the end of British rule.

From 1945 to 1947, the Labour government tried hard to negotiate a compromise settlement between Pandit Nehru's Hindudominated Congress Party and Mohammed Ali Jinnah's Muslim League that would enable the British to hand over the whole country to a single all-India successor regime. Of course, it all came to nothing.

Communal violence between Hindu, Muslim and Sikh was instead growing ever more widespread and out of control, with whole districts torched and their inhabitants slaughtered.

The British troops in India were too few to keep the peace and, in any case, there was a danger that they too might be engulfed in the violence, with resulting heavy casualties.

So Attlee's Cabinet decided that the only solution must be to partition the India of the Raj between a new Muslim state of Pakistan and a diminished India, largely Hindu in population.

More to the point, Attlee appointed a ruthlessly decisive leader, Admiral of the Fleet Earl Mountbatten, as the last British Viceroy of India.

He was instructed that if last-minute attempts at a compromise between Nehru and Jinnah failed, he was to enforce partition and wind up British rule.

In short, he was told to extricate Britain from a horrendous mess - regardless of the consequences for India or the Indians.

In the event, Mountbatten brought forward the date for the ending of the Raj from June 1948 to August 1947, complete with a published timetable which wonderfully concentrated everyone's minds.

It is true that before, and after, the handover to the successor states of India and Pakistan, communal violence degenerated into a hate-fuelled mass madness, with 600,000 killed and 14 million refugees on the move.
Yet Britain was well out of it, and the loss of life among British servicemen was minimal.

Today's politicians could also learn from the example of the French in Algeria in the 1950s.

Algeria had been an integral part of France since it was first conquered in the 1830s, and it contained a large minority population of French colonists, some down to the third and fourth generation.

So Algeria was far more deeply embedded in the national life of France than India ever was in the national life of Britain - let alone today's Iraq in the lives of either America or Britain.

This was why the French fought a brutal but unsuccessful war against Algerian insurgents from 1954 onwards.

It took a great soldier-statesman, Charles de Gaulle, who came to power in France in 1958, to know when to retreat from Algeria and dare to do it.
In the face of bitter opposition from the French settlers and from reactionary elements within the French Army itself, he negotiated with the Algerian National Liberation Front for the end of French rule. On July 1, 1962, following a referendum, Algeria became an independent country.
But no fewer than 600,000 French settlers were to leave Algeria for France - a trauma far worse than any suffered by the British at the end of the Raj.

So the lessons of history are harsh but clear. One: recognise when the moment has come to abandon a failed enterprise. Two: have the courage to accept the inevitable costs of retreat, whether human or in loss of national prestige.

Now is therefore the time to set a firm date for British withdrawal from Iraq, even if that date is at present kept a secret.

But it must be up to us and not the Iraqi government to fix that date, just as it was up to us and not Indian politicians to fix the date for the end of the British Raj in India.

But what about history's lessons for the future?

First, never expect an intervention in a foreign country will prove an easy in-and-out-job. Instead, count on it that there will be unexpected and unwelcome complications and entanglements.

And second, the most important lesson of all: stay out of other people's troubles and mind your own business. Never resort to arms, except in the face of a direct threat to national independence.

source

[Carnyx]

This was why the French fought a brutal but unsuccessful war against Algerian insurgents from 1954 onwards.

The war was militarily won.

[Errigal]

Originally Posted by Carnyx

The war was militarily won.

Yes, but Algeria was impossible to govern and therefore had to be abandoned by France, as the article says. It is worth mentioning the French did have military control over Algeria before independence. They were even able to carry out test detonations of their top secret atomic bombs in the deserts of Algeria before and after the independence referendum.