Catastrophe in Basra
To understand the full scale of the catastrophe that might be about to enfold British forces in southern Iraq, it is important to be clear about what happened on Monday. When two SAS men were waved down at a police checkpoint, they did not stop. Why not? Because the Iraqi police force has become so densely infiltrated by terrorists and extremists that they believed their lives would have been at risk. In May this year Basra’s chief of police, Hassan al-Sade, admitted that he had lost control of 75 per cent of his 13,750strong force, and that his men were mainly loyal to one Shiite faction or another.
Faced with a checkpoint, therefore, the reaction of two undercover SAS men was not to hand over their papers to the legitimate organs of authority in Basra — supposedly the quietest and best-run part of Iraq outside the Kurdish areas — but to kill a policeman who may have presented no threat whatever to their lives. That was the first sign of a disastrous breakdown of trust between the British and the local police.
Later that day it became clear that the deterioration of civic structures was even worse. The Iraqi interior ministry decided that the British servicemen should be released from the Basra clink, and gave orders to that effect. The local police in Basra ignored the orders, and on the face of it one can see their point. One of their men had been shot, possibly in cold blood, by a British soldier, and they not unreasonably believed that there should be a judicial process.
On the other hand, one can also understand very well the decision, later in the day, by Brigadier John Lorimer, commander of 12 Mechanised Brigade, to storm the police station where the men were being held. He had no confidence in the Iraqi judicial process, and he thought it highly likely that the two men would be summarily executed. He was probably right. We therefore had an extraordinary and depressing spectacle.
After two years in which the British have prided themselves on ‘working with’ the Iraqi police, and ‘building them up’, it was necessary for the British army to attack and demolish a police station in Basra. For two years we have all been kidding ourselves that the British and the Iraqis have been working hand-in-glove to restore public confidence, in Basra, in the forces of law and order. This week the citizens of Basra saw British soldiers firing on the Iraqi police, crushing Iraqi police cars with their tank tracks, and destroying the very symbol and locus of civic authority. No wonder the Shiite militiamen are gaining ground.
The reality in Basra is that terrorism roadside bombings — have long made it impossible for the British to exercise any thing but the sketchiest control of the area. They have been forced to rely on local police, and it is now clear that the corruption of the police force is taking the area further and further beyond our power to influence. In Baghdad and the Sunni triangle, meanwhile, the tempo of suicide bombings increases, the slaughter intensifies, and the insurgency is patently too ubiquitous for US forces to repress. It is now obvious that the ‘victory’ in April 2003 was no such thing; that Saddam and his associates successfully organised a network of resistance that seems to have gained in strength, not weakened, and it is not hard to understand why.
Robert S. McNamara, the former US secretary of state, was once asked to explain the disaster of Vietnam, a disaster with which Iraq may soon withstand comparison. ‘We weren’t fighting communism,’ he conceded. ‘We were fighting nationalism.’ In the end the rebel armies will always have, as their rallying-cry, the fact of foreign troops on Iraqi soil. As this week’s events have shown, it is becoming harder to prove that Britain’s 8,500 troops in Iraq are doing any good, and next week’s Labour conference is likely to be dominated by demands that they be withdraw. Should they?
The grim fact is that Britain’s essentially subservient role requires that we stay as long as the Americans stay, and the Americans will not pull out until the Iraqis ask them to pull out, and that is as it should be. We must stay at least until the Iraqis hold a referendum on their constitution next month. If they approve the constitution, we must stay at least until they can hold fresh elections; and if they reject the constitution, then we must stay for as long as it takes to erect a new one. We will have to keep hoping that democracy will somehow seed itself in this scorched and blasted soil. In so far as the toppling of Saddam has brought benefits to the people of Iraq — and it has — we must continue to try to build on them. In so far as Iraq is a mess, we must accept that it is a mess very largely of our own making, and that as long as the Iraqi government believes we can do any good by staying around to help clear it up, we are morally obliged to do so.
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