Leaving Iraq In Ruins

The Six-Year Adventure In Iraq Has Cost Britain Dearly, Though It Has Cost Iraqis More

By James Denselow
Wednesday 10 December 2008 13.30 GMT
Courtesy Of The Guardian

It has cost us £7,882m, with almost 500 British troops killed or injured, plus an unknown (or unreleased) number of Iraqis killed or injured in and around Basra. Those are the most immediate statistics from Britain's six years in Iraq but they hide a far more damaging story of the death of liberal interventionism.

There are two main debates concerning Britain and Iraq:

(1) Should we have gone to war in the first place?

(2) Once we had invaded did we have a moral responsibility to only leave once conditions were right?

In terms of the first question the high point of the anti-war movement was the march of February 2003, which surely provided the backdrop to the more politically significant departure of Robin Cook and others from the government and a multitude of leaks made to the press – in particular the GCHQ employee Katherine Gun's disclosure of US spying on members of the security council. The pressure of the anti-war movement was such that Bush offered to let Blair sit the war out – as Rumsfeld even endorsed at a press conference.

There is little doubt in my mind that the invasion would have occurred without Britain's involvement. With this in mind the anti-war movement (in Britain at least) could never have actually stopped the war.

For those who argued against the war the second question was harder to answer. How do you ethically leave a country where you have just unleashed mass chaos and destruction? The war in Iraq has always been a duality between what was happening in country and the narrative of the conflict back in the US and the UK. Arguably therefore, one of the greatest successes of the Bush administration was its ability to switch tack, following the failure to find WMD, by claiming that we were there to help Iraqis and that Saddam was an evil man that the world is better off without. Bush's argument followed that now that Saddam is gone we have a moral responsibility to help Iraq get back on its feet.

This brings us to the third and least discussed debate: what are our abilities to shape conditions on the ground? Framing our presence in Iraq in moral terms hid the inability of our presence alone to shape events. Paul Bremer and the CPA was the high tide of illusionary neo-colonial rule that treated the "freedom" of the new Iraq as a template on which to build a perfect free-market US ally in the heart of the Middle East. It failed and the political structures it created allowed ethnicity and sectarian affiliation to become the de facto political alliances. US-designed "Iraqi democracy" was hijacked by a civil war which burned brightly in 2005 beyond the blast walls of the Green Zone.

Since late-2006 the "return of the realists" signalled an attempt to "put lipstick on a pig" by reversing what had become an utter bloodbath in which Iraqis in Baghdad were having themselves tattooed with their address to ensure families could find their bodies. The "surge" providing the illusion that the US could control and direct the situation under the sage instructions of General Petraeus but behind the surge paying off enemies and allowing them control of their own fiefdoms was the real recipe for success.

This relative success is fragile indeed. Petraeus has regularly spoken of slippage and at the start of December more than 200 civilians were killed or found dead in the first week. Among them were 17 children.

The costs of the Iraq war are indeed high, and they have and will continue to be paid mainly by Iraqis themselves. The numbers of dead are too high to be consistently tracked, ranging from 89,000 (Iraq Body Count) to 650,000 (The Lancet) to more than 1.2 million (ORB Polling). In addition, countless thousands have been injured; more than two million Iraqis have fled the country and more than 1.5million are still internally displaced.

These numbers put the cost of the war to Britain in sharp perspective. Future foreign policy adventures will be straitjacketed by the diplomatic reputation and the military capacity lost over the Iraq war. The departure of British troops from the Iraq folly, likely to be completed by June next year, is not even disguised by the policy of "as Iraqis stand up, we stand down". The final humiliation is that US troops will replacing them at Basra airport.