MoD documents leaked to Andrew Gilligan show that the ‘special relationship’ in Iraq was more like a bad marriage: riven with misunderstanding, irritation and hurt feelings
It may have made it into such pillars of the zeitgeist as The Simpsons, the film Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and Geri Halliwell’s single ‘Bag It Up’. But it is still, perhaps, a little surprising that that seminal work of cod psychology, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, should have infiltrated a secret Ministry of Defence report into the war on Iraq.
Let me tell you, the average MoD leaked document is hard going: thickets of bureaucratic bindweed wrapped tightly around the odd meaningful sentence. Not this time. The set of classified interview transcripts with senior army officers who had returned from Iraq, leaked to me this week, reads like the problem page of Bella magazine, with relationship troubles — special relationship troubles — breaking out all over.
Britain, it seems, was the Venusian, the woman who wanted to have it all — to send tanks, drop bombs, but also cuddle Iraqi children. America was the man who just didn’t appreciate her, just didn’t care. To Colonel J.K. Tanner, Britain’s chief of staff in Iraq, the Americans were indeed ‘a group of Martians’ for whom ‘dialogue is alien’. It’s not the first time it’s been said, of course — a celebrated essay by the US writer Robert Kagan introduced the analogy — but it’s the first time it’s been said officially.
In the reports, the hurt and anguish is clear. Major-general Andrew Stewart, the British commander, described how the overall US commander, General Rick Sanchez, never visited and never called; they didn’t even have a secure communications link. Britain wanted the Americans to fix the patio — sorry, the national electricity grid — and take more interest in the kids (that is, talk to the locals, not shoot them).
But, though all the Americans who did visit the British sector (except the proconsul, Paul Bremer) ‘listened attentively’, Major-general Stewart said, ‘we did not seem to change anything... We need to recognise that we do not get the influence we expect.’ The US ‘neither listened to us nor consulted us’, said Brigadier Bill Moore, commander of 19 Mechanised Brigade.
The Americans, said Colonel Tanner, shared more information with the Dutch than the British, and nor was this an isolated case. Remarkably, the documents say that the Britons in the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), searching after the war for those elusive weapons of mass destruction, were denied sight of US intelligence on the subject, which proved ‘the single biggest impediment to UK operations within the ISG’.
The battle for influence was essentially lost before the war even started, according to the papers: at Central Command, the US headquarters preparing for the invasion, British officers ‘were politely excluded from key planning for much of September and October 2002’ because ‘the US was unsure British forces were going to arrive in time’ — Tony Blair being reluctant to tell the British public that he had already signed up with Team Dubya, and had been planning military action since February.
The traditional response in Britain will be to deplore all this, and say that of course we, with our vast peacekeeping experience, our friendly soldiers in their floppy hats, should have been heeded by those clumsy, trigger-happy Yanks. But reading through the secret interviews, I felt a growing sympathy with the Martians, and a growing irritation with the inhabitants of Venus.
Take Major-general Graeme Lamb, the commander of Britain’s 3 Division in the months after the war. He told his interviewer: ‘It is easy to become fixated by the enemy. Securing military victory over the enemy is probably not a reality.’ Instead, Lamb favoured ‘soft effects’, such as improving the lives of the local people, which ‘really wasn’t that difficult and didn’t require that many experts... Once you knew what you needed to do, you then dispatched the nearest captain with the “find me 100 trucks” order and it all worked. It didn’t need a suit with a 2.2 in civilian affairs.’
Or Major-general Stewart, who ‘evaded’ and ‘refused’ US orders to take on Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army, saying: ‘I was trying to achieve the same result through different means... trying to neutralise Sadr through the use of local Iraqis and succeeding.’
Well. With apologies to Lamb, the enemy surely was quite important. And sending out a captain with 100 trucks did not ‘all work’. As some of the other reports say, Basra’s infrastructure remained in ruins, partly because there were not enough (indeed any) experts and partly because security became increasingly impossible.
It’s also highly debatable whether negotiation with Sadr — a key source of that insecurity — worked better than force. In 2006, some time after both generals had left, Basra was in anarchy. And by 2007, the policy of negotiation had led Britain to what was effectively a surrender. To the intense frustration of many British officers — no cowards they — we signed a deal that we would not enter the city in return for a promise that Sadr’s forces would stop attacking us.
It kept the body count down, which was what mattered in London. But it also abandoned Basra to the Mahdi army, who swaggered through the streets closing down video shops and enforcing headscarves on women.
In their part of Iraq, meanwhile, the Americans were turning it round. They’d made terrible errors, but they didn’t give up. And though they learned, and they changed, they still recognised the necessity of force. By spring last year, they had brought the same approach to Basra. The city was stabilised not by the British army, but by the Iraqi and American armies. The Sadrists were driven out not by negotiation, but by force. The British, meanwhile, constrained by their surrender agreement, stayed put in their barracks.
Of course, you could say that with relatively few troops, and a general lack of political commitment, negotiation was the only available choice. But that sounds like an argument for more troops, and more political commitment, to me — or else, for an all-out withdrawal. We need to do these things properly, or not at all.
The leaked papers show British naivety on two fronts. In postwar Iraq, smiles and handshakes could not work. Even previous peace support operations, such as Bosnia, had only been resolved by the use, or threat, of massive force. And with the American alliance, we only belatedly realised that this was no marriage, but more like the relationship between General Stewart and his driver. The harsh reality is that that, in Iraq, was just as well. The Americans were broadly right, and we were broadly wrong. I, for one, am glad they ignored us.