Fantasy and fiction in Iraq
From Correlli Barnett
Sir: Your leading article (21 October) and James Forsyth’s piece (‘Iran could tear the Tories to pieces’) both describe General Sir Richard Dannatt’s statements in his interview in the Daily Mail and in subsequent meetings with the media as an ‘outburst’ — and even, in Forsyth’s case, ‘an ill-considered outburst’. This is an absurdly dismissive description of a carefully pondered operational assessment of the Anglo-American dilemma in Iraq by a very cool-headed Chief of the General Staff. Your description is in fact positively Blairite in its attempt to deal with a formidable argument by diminishing its author.
The general’s authoritative statement has done no more than corroborate what those of us not in Blairite denial have plainly recognised — that the situation in Iraq is getting nowhere politically while worsening militarily. The problem with our cross-party political elite (and that includes commentators like yourself and Mr Forsyth) is that in regard to Iraq they deal in fantasies and fictions. Thus they talk of a democratically elected government, or a ‘young democracy’, when the reality is of a cobbled-together ragbag of politicians whose writ barely extends beyond the Green Zone. Your leading article states that it is ‘a fundamental truth’ that we are in Iraq at the request of the Iraqi government. Given the spectral nature of this government and its utter dependence on the American vice-regal regime, this ‘request’ is not a fundamental truth but a fundamental fantasy. Equally a fundamental fantasy rather than a fundamental truth is ‘the full UN authority’ you cite, because it is simply a hapless postfacto blessing of the illegal AngloAmerican occupation of Iraq. It has no strategic significance at all.
Nor will it do merely to resort to BoyScoutish rhetoric about not baling out together with flesh-creeping allusion to the Islamist threat. You should address yourself, like General Dannatt, to the operational realities. What is your own realistic estimate of how long it will take to establish a stable democracy in Iraq that is able to enforce its rule over the whole territory? What is your own estimate of how many British and American servicemen will have suffered death or wounds in the meantime? What is your own estimate of the impact of our Iraq commitment on our ability to meet that other commitment in Afghanistan?
Correlli Barnett
Norwich
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