Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect's blog
And so, finally, it ends. Six years after the Iraq invasion, British combat troops will be withdrawn by 31st July 2009. Britain's involvement in Iraq during the first world war is recalled at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery outside Basra. Now, the latest engagement is also marked—by a redbrick memorial beside the airport that records the 178 British dead.
Two positions are clearly identifiable in discussions about what Iraq has meant for Britain. The government, the ministry of defence (MoD) and the armed forces argue that the withdrawal is a vindication of their strategy. In 2003, Britain intervened to depose a dictator and to establish a legitimate democracy for the benefit of all Iraqis. These aims have been achieved—although the cost in lives has been higher than anticipated.
But for large sections of the media and political opinion, the British involvement in Basra has been a disaster and the withdrawal, demanded by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, is an admission of political folly and military failure. The fact that the agreement for withdrawal was signed with seven other countries, including El Salvador and Estonia, indicates the lack of esteem that Maliki now has for Britain. The US, by contrast, organised its own bilateral agreement.
This second interpretation seems closer to reality—yet it is also inadequate. Above all, it ignores events since March 2008 and overlooks the potential of the situation today. British policymakers and the public—and, of course, the armed forces—need to understand what happened in Basra, especially the significance of "Operation Charge of the Knights" and the role of a small number of officers, including Colonel Richard Iron, before drawing any conclusions about future policy in the region.
To counter monotonously negative Iraq press coverage, the MoD organised the first of a series of visits for "opinion formers" at the end of 2008. I was among the visitors who arrived in Basra at 3am on 27th October. As we entered Iraqi airspace, the lights inside our Hercules aircraft were extinguished and we were told to put on helmets and body armour. Disturbingly violent evasive manoeuvres followed until we landed—hard. Outside, the night air was hot and, in the distance, oil fields burned. Allenby Lines, our base for a few days, was brutally functional. We slept on mattresses in kennel-like caverns known as "stone-henges." Beyond the camp an arid plain stretched to the western horizon. To the east, the low urban sprawl of Basra was visible. Everything was brown or grey.
The recent history of Basra begins in September 2007. By that time, the British had insufficient forces to withstand the assaults of Muqtada al Sadr's Madhi army and could no longer even pretend to impose order on the city (see Bartle Bull's article, "Iraq's rebel democrats,"Prospect June 2005). The decision to withdraw was taken in London. It was undoubtedly necessary at the time, but only because the British mission was failing. The Mahdi army controlled most of the city—challenged only by Basra's Iraqi security chief General Mohan al-Faraiji and those parts of his forces that remained loyal. The reputation of the British was at its lowest.
In early 2008, things began to change. During much of the British occupation, the Shatt-al-Arab hotel in north Basra was a key base of military operations. It was the scene of intense fighting and a number of soldiers died defending it. After the British withdrew from the hotel on 8th April 2007, Mohan appropriated it as his headquarters. Flanked by two Apaches, and accompanied by US special forces, we flew to the base by helicopter on the second day of our visit. The moment the helicopter touched the ground, the rear gunner ordered us out and the pilot, fearing mortar fire, quickly took off again. Before us was the hotel—battered beyond any pretension to genteel post-imperial decline, its façade pockmarked with bullet and shrapnel holes. Yet it was here that the modern city of Basra was saved.
Colonel Richard Iron was critical to this redemption. In 2007 and 2008, Iron had been assigned to General Mohan as a liaison officer and mentor. It was an auspicious partnership, which Iron described to me later with typical phlegmatism: "I just was lucky to be in a pivotal position at the time."
Iron (pictured below) is an unusual officer. He joined the army in 1975 and graduated from staff college near the top of his year. Two episodes in his career were decisive to his conduct in Basra. As a young captain in the 1980s, he served for two years in Oman. He describes this as the "key experience" since he learned how to speak Arabic and to "respect Arabic culture and the Arab way." Then in the early years of this decade he was sent to Sierra Leone as an expert military witness for the country's special court. He spent months in the jungle with the Revolutionary United Front and other ex-guerrillas, learning how insurgency movements think and operate.
***
In fact, his intimacy with the local security forces was essential to the recovery of Basra. Early in 2008, Iron and Mohan began to develop a plan to seize control of Basra from the Mahdi army. They envisaged an assault on the city by at least a full local division with US support. That would be enough to drive out the Mahdi army from their strongholds and re-establish a cordon of Iraqi government security. Reconstruction projects could then take place.
The operation was planned to take place between July and September 2008. This timeframe was designed to allow the US to fight the Mosul battle against al Qaeda first but also, critically, to create the conditions needed for success in Basra: increased force levels, better equipment, specialised urban training, deployed defensible bases around the city and control of the border with Iran, across which weapons and insurgents were moving freely. As Iron explained, "It was clear to both Mohan and myself that the British-trained but un-mentored Iraqi 14th Division could not defeat the Mahdi army as it was."
In March they flew to Baghdad for a crucial meeting to present their plan to both US and Iraqi senior officials—including General David Petraeus and the Iraqi ministers of defence and the interior. The plan was quickly relayed to Prime Minister Maliki, who ordered the operation to start not in July, but on 25th March, without any preparation. The British and Americans were given less than 4 days notice.
Maliki's confidence was based on some misperceptions. As Iron notes: "Maliki appears to have been unconvinced that the situation in Basra was as bad as it was. So he announced that the operation would start with none of our required conditions in place." Maliki saw the plan as a means of affirming his authority and enhancing his reputation. Petraeus tried to dissuade Maliki from this course of action, which the US general believed detracted from the battle against al Qaeda in Iraq; a furious argument apparently took place. But after arriving in Basra on 24th March, Maliki announced that Operation Charge of the Knights would start the next day.
The fighting that ensued was intense. Both sides suffered heavy casualties: at least 300 were killed and 600 wounded. The start of the operation was nearly catastrophic. Insufficient Iraqi forces were deployed with inadequate support. But with his reputation on the line, Maliki eventually poured Iraqi resources into Basra, including, decisively, the Iraqi 1st division with its US Marine Corps military training teams. In the end, US air and intelligence support, co-ordinated by US Marine mentors, proved critical. During the operation, coalition forces were coordinated from the Shatt-al-Arab hotel's operations room.
The success of the operation was assisted by the fact that the insurgents chose to fight more or less conventionally, making them particularly vulnerable to Hellfire missiles fired from unmanned Predator drones. As Iron observed, if they had adopted a more irregular strategy, such as urban terrorism and mass demonstrations, the result might have been different. Perhaps their early success led them to believe that they could defeat the offensive. But they were wrong. By early April, the Mahdi army had been defeated; around 120 fighters had been killed (though Iraqi officials claim to have killed more than 200) and their commanders had fled to Iran. It was a resounding victory.
The British role in all this was initially minor, although officers like Iron played a pivotal role. It is fair to say that Basra was saved by Prime Minister Maliki, and Maliki was saved by US airpower when the operation got bogged down. But this success belatedly allowed the British to help the Iraqis design an effective counter-insurgency strategy, supported by British mentors and trainers. By contrast, before March 2008, even though our soldiers demonstrated tactical acumen on the streets of Basra, the British campaign had revealed glaring weaknesses at higher levels of command.
***
British troops first entered Basra in April 2003 as the culmination of the US-led invasion. The security situation was initially benign, but the lack of any real military plan for the post-invasion period quickly became apparent. The coalition dissolved the Baath party and the Iraqi army, and anarchy was loosed. In the summer of 2003 looting became endemic. Although constrained by complex conditions, the British never took control; commanders, especially those in Britain, failed to address the obstructions and develop a coherent strategy.
By 2004, a Shia insurgency had developed in the power vacuum; the Madhi army and a number of other Shia groups emerged, including the Badr brigade. The insurgency was predictably centred on the most deprived districts of the city, the Hiyaniyah in the west and Five Mile Market in the north, and by 2007 the fighters had taken control of large parts of the city. In the absence of any central authority, the militias offered the best prospects for physical and economic security for Shias; they also brought with them violence and arbitrary justice. In addition, they infiltrated the Iraqi security forces; on local estimates, about 4,000 Basra policemen were members of the Mahdi army and Basra policemen were implicated in seven assassination attempts on their own police chief. In September 2006, rebel police captured two SAS troopers working in the city. The soldiers were rescued but the police station where they were held was destroyed as it had become an insurgent stronghold.
British officers in Basra and in Britain failed to understand the nature of their situation. As Iron puts it; "They mistook Beirut for Palermo." The British chief of defence staff, Jock Stirrup, summed up the view held by senior command in December 2008: "Our presence was creating a focus for Shia discontent. It was creating a spurious but tangible legitimacy for violence." British forces saw themselves as the targets of criminal rather than insurgent attacks, and because numerous civilians were killed in the recurrent firefights British generals had, by 2007, conveniently defined their own forces as part of the problem.
In fact, the Mahdi army targeted British forces because they rightly saw them as their prime opponents in the city. They laid siege to British bases and merely resupplying them became major operations, in which the relieving supply columns ran the gauntlet of numerous roadside bombs and gun battles. Worse, by 2006 the British were working in an intelligence void; they did not know, for example, who controlled the Umm Qasr port. By the middle of 2007 General Mohan had accepted that the only option left to the British was to leave the city. For the most part, they had fallen back into a defensive posture, conducting armoured patrols in helmets and body armour, reminiscent of the US tactics in the Balkans that had attracted British criticism.
Jock Stirrup has claimed that there was no prospect of increasing force levels to the same extent as the Americans, because Britain was by then committed to Afghanistan. It is true that Britain could not have matched the US surge, but it was the MoD's choice to commit so heavily to Helmand from 2006, when Basra could have been salvaged. Moreover, this commitment cannot explain the failure to address the insurgency in 2004 and 2005; there was little increase in force numbers even though the situation was spiralling out of control.
Whatever the mitigating circumstances—including the unpopularity of the conflict at home—there is a critical index of Britain's performance: US perceptions. One of the main rationales for joining the invasion was to sustain a close alliance with the US. Yet American officers have been brutally frank: "The short version is that the Brits have lost Basra, if indeed they ever had it," said a source close to Petraeus. The presumption of British superiority thanks to experience in Northern Ireland turned out to be unfounded. Although the British officer corps retains talented individuals, like Iron, the Basra episode has shown systemic failings of operational command.
And this military failure was echoed in a wider political failure to rebuild Basra. There was no economic development plan in place at the start of the invasion and none was implemented. The department for international development's official purpose is the alleviation of global poverty and it was therefore reluctant to become entangled with strategic interests. This was compounded by the opposition of the department's secretary of state, Clare Short, to the invasion—she refused to collaborate with the MoD and foreign office as they prepared for war in 2003.
***
Yet despite this "comprehensive" failure, the Charge of the Knights has salvaged Basra for the British. The danger now is that with the government so focused on withdrawal—the popular option—we may fumble a second chance to get Basra right. British forces will leave the city in June but this should not be an end to our involvement. Basra sits on about $40bn of oil revenue a year; Shell will soon start to sink new oil wells. The city is located at a strategic point, on the Shatt-al-Arab waterway near the Iranian border. It has two ports and a rail link to Baghdad. It is a prime location for investment—and having been there for six years, the British are well positioned to take advantage.
About 300 British soldiers are now organised into military training teams embedded in Iraqi forces around the region, and answering to General Mohan's successor, Major General Mohammed Jowad Huweidi. He has emphasised the need for continued military support, and there is residual respect for the British in Basra. But by June 2009, even these forces will be gone. The only military personnel left in Iraq will be the naval training team in Umm Qasr, some officer cadet trainers and MoD advisers. Not only could the training teams have helped the Iraqi security forces, but they could also have served a useful role in military diplomacy.
The department for business and enterprise should view Basra as a prime opportunity—yet only one representative is now working in the city. Basra's electricity, sewage and rubbish systems will need high levels of foreign investment and British companies should benefit. If Britain does not invest in Basra, others will. The government should not be contemplating disengagement; not least because 178 British soldiers and several thousand Basrawis died fighting there.
Most people in Basra want the British to help rebuild their city. If the Shatt-al-Arab hotel could be restored to the chic elegance of the 1920s, it would be a symbol of Britain's restored reputation in Iraq—and a sign that an unlikely strategic victory had been won from a tactical defeat.
Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect's blog
And so, finally, it ends. Six years after the Iraq invasion, British combat troops will be withdrawn by 31st July 2009. Britain's involvement in Iraq during the first world war is recalled at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery outside Basra. Now, the latest engagement is also marked—by a redbrick memorial beside the airport that records the 178 British dead.
Two positions are clearly identifiable in discussions about what Iraq has meant for Britain. The government, the ministry of defence (MoD) and the armed forces argue that the withdrawal is a vindication of their strategy. In 2003, Britain intervened to depose a dictator and to establish a legitimate democracy for the benefit of all Iraqis. These aims have been achieved—although the cost in lives has been higher than anticipated.
But for large sections of the media and political opinion, the British involvement in Basra has been a disaster and the withdrawal, demanded by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, is an admission of political folly and military failure. The fact that the agreement for withdrawal was signed with seven other countries, including El Salvador and Estonia, indicates the lack of esteem that Maliki now has for Britain. The US, by contrast, organised its own bilateral agreement.
This second interpretation seems closer to reality—yet it is also inadequate. Above all, it ignores events since March 2008 and overlooks the potential of the situation today. British policymakers and the public—and, of course, the armed forces—need to understand what happened in Basra, especially the significance of "Operation Charge of the Knights" and the role of a small number of officers, including Colonel Richard Iron, before drawing any conclusions about future policy in the region.
To counter monotonously negative Iraq press coverage, the MoD organised the first of a series of visits for "opinion formers" at the end of 2008. I was among the visitors who arrived in Basra at 3am on 27th October. As we entered Iraqi airspace, the lights inside our Hercules aircraft were extinguished and we were told to put on helmets and body armour. Disturbingly violent evasive manoeuvres followed until we landed—hard. Outside, the night air was hot and, in the distance, oil fields burned. Allenby Lines, our base for a few days, was brutally functional. We slept on mattresses in kennel-like caverns known as "stone-henges." Beyond the camp an arid plain stretched to the western horizon. To the east, the low urban sprawl of Basra was visible. Everything was brown or grey.
The recent history of Basra begins in September 2007. By that time, the British had insufficient forces to withstand the assaults of Muqtada al Sadr's Madhi army and could no longer even pretend to impose order on the city (see Bartle Bull's article, "Iraq's rebel democrats,"Prospect June 2005). The decision to withdraw was taken in London. It was undoubtedly necessary at the time, but only because the British mission was failing. The Mahdi army controlled most of the city—challenged only by Basra's Iraqi security chief General Mohan al-Faraiji and those parts of his forces that remained loyal. The reputation of the British was at its lowest.
In early 2008, things began to change. During much of the British occupation, the Shatt-al-Arab hotel in north Basra was a key base of military operations. It was the scene of intense fighting and a number of soldiers died defending it. After the British withdrew from the hotel on 8th April 2007, Mohan appropriated it as his headquarters. Flanked by two Apaches, and accompanied by US special forces, we flew to the base by helicopter on the second day of our visit. The moment the helicopter touched the ground, the rear gunner ordered us out and the pilot, fearing mortar fire, quickly took off again. Before us was the hotel—battered beyond any pretension to genteel post-imperial decline, its façade pockmarked with bullet and shrapnel holes. Yet it was here that the modern city of Basra was saved.
Colonel Richard Iron was critical to this redemption. In 2007 and 2008, Iron had been assigned to General Mohan as a liaison officer and mentor. It was an auspicious partnership, which Iron described to me later with typical phlegmatism: "I just was lucky to be in a pivotal position at the time."
Iron (pictured below) is an unusual officer. He joined the army in 1975 and graduated from staff college near the top of his year. Two episodes in his career were decisive to his conduct in Basra. As a young captain in the 1980s, he served for two years in Oman. He describes this as the "key experience" since he learned how to speak Arabic and to "respect Arabic culture and the Arab way." Then in the early years of this decade he was sent to Sierra Leone as an expert military witness for the country's special court. He spent months in the jungle with the Revolutionary United Front and other ex-guerrillas, learning how insurgency movements think and operate.
***
In fact, his intimacy with the local security forces was essential to the recovery of Basra. Early in 2008, Iron and Mohan began to develop a plan to seize control of Basra from the Mahdi army. They envisaged an assault on the city by at least a full local division with US support. That would be enough to drive out the Mahdi army from their strongholds and re-establish a cordon of Iraqi government security. Reconstruction projects could then take place.
The operation was planned to take place between July and September 2008. This timeframe was designed to allow the US to fight the Mosul battle against al Qaeda first but also, critically, to create the conditions needed for success in Basra: increased force levels, better equipment, specialised urban training, deployed defensible bases around the city and control of the border with Iran, across which weapons and insurgents were moving freely. As Iron explained, "It was clear to both Mohan and myself that the British-trained but un-mentored Iraqi 14th Division could not defeat the Mahdi army as it was."
In March they flew to Baghdad for a crucial meeting to present their plan to both US and Iraqi senior officials—including General David Petraeus and the Iraqi ministers of defence and the interior. The plan was quickly relayed to Prime Minister Maliki, who ordered the operation to start not in July, but on 25th March, without any preparation. The British and Americans were given less than 4 days notice.
Maliki's confidence was based on some misperceptions. As Iron notes: "Maliki appears to have been unconvinced that the situation in Basra was as bad as it was. So he announced that the operation would start with none of our required conditions in place." Maliki saw the plan as a means of affirming his authority and enhancing his reputation. Petraeus tried to dissuade Maliki from this course of action, which the US general believed detracted from the battle against al Qaeda in Iraq; a furious argument apparently took place. But after arriving in Basra on 24th March, Maliki announced that Operation Charge of the Knights would start the next day.
The fighting that ensued was intense. Both sides suffered heavy casualties: at least 300 were killed and 600 wounded. The start of the operation was nearly catastrophic. Insufficient Iraqi forces were deployed with inadequate support. But with his reputation on the line, Maliki eventually poured Iraqi resources into Basra, including, decisively, the Iraqi 1st division with its US Marine Corps military training teams. In the end, US air and intelligence support, co-ordinated by US Marine mentors, proved critical. During the operation, coalition forces were coordinated from the Shatt-al-Arab hotel's operations room.
The success of the operation was assisted by the fact that the insurgents chose to fight more or less conventionally, making them particularly vulnerable to Hellfire missiles fired from unmanned Predator drones. As Iron observed, if they had adopted a more irregular strategy, such as urban terrorism and mass demonstrations, the result might have been different. Perhaps their early success led them to believe that they could defeat the offensive. But they were wrong. By early April, the Mahdi army had been defeated; around 120 fighters had been killed (though Iraqi officials claim to have killed more than 200) and their commanders had fled to Iran. It was a resounding victory.
The British role in all this was initially minor, although officers like Iron played a pivotal role. It is fair to say that Basra was saved by Prime Minister Maliki, and Maliki was saved by US airpower when the operation got bogged down. But this success belatedly allowed the British to help the Iraqis design an effective counter-insurgency strategy, supported by British mentors and trainers. By contrast, before March 2008, even though our soldiers demonstrated tactical acumen on the streets of Basra, the British campaign had revealed glaring weaknesses at higher levels of command.
***
British troops first entered Basra in April 2003 as the culmination of the US-led invasion. The security situation was initially benign, but the lack of any real military plan for the post-invasion period quickly became apparent. The coalition dissolved the Baath party and the Iraqi army, and anarchy was loosed. In the summer of 2003 looting became endemic. Although constrained by complex conditions, the British never took control; commanders, especially those in Britain, failed to address the obstructions and develop a coherent strategy.
By 2004, a Shia insurgency had developed in the power vacuum; the Madhi army and a number of other Shia groups emerged, including the Badr brigade. The insurgency was predictably centred on the most deprived districts of the city, the Hiyaniyah in the west and Five Mile Market in the north, and by 2007 the fighters had taken control of large parts of the city. In the absence of any central authority, the militias offered the best prospects for physical and economic security for Shias; they also brought with them violence and arbitrary justice. In addition, they infiltrated the Iraqi security forces; on local estimates, about 4,000 Basra policemen were members of the Mahdi army and Basra policemen were implicated in seven assassination attempts on their own police chief. In September 2006, rebel police captured two SAS troopers working in the city. The soldiers were rescued but the police station where they were held was destroyed as it had become an insurgent stronghold.
British officers in Basra and in Britain failed to understand the nature of their situation. As Iron puts it; "They mistook Beirut for Palermo." The British chief of defence staff, Jock Stirrup, summed up the view held by senior command in December 2008: "Our presence was creating a focus for Shia discontent. It was creating a spurious but tangible legitimacy for violence." British forces saw themselves as the targets of criminal rather than insurgent attacks, and because numerous civilians were killed in the recurrent firefights British generals had, by 2007, conveniently defined their own forces as part of the problem.
In fact, the Mahdi army targeted British forces because they rightly saw them as their prime opponents in the city. They laid siege to British bases and merely resupplying them became major operations, in which the relieving supply columns ran the gauntlet of numerous roadside bombs and gun battles. Worse, by 2006 the British were working in an intelligence void; they did not know, for example, who controlled the Umm Qasr port. By the middle of 2007 General Mohan had accepted that the only option left to the British was to leave the city. For the most part, they had fallen back into a defensive posture, conducting armoured patrols in helmets and body armour, reminiscent of the US tactics in the Balkans that had attracted British criticism.
Jock Stirrup has claimed that there was no prospect of increasing force levels to the same extent as the Americans, because Britain was by then committed to Afghanistan. It is true that Britain could not have matched the US surge, but it was the MoD's choice to commit so heavily to Helmand from 2006, when Basra could have been salvaged. Moreover, this commitment cannot explain the failure to address the insurgency in 2004 and 2005; there was little increase in force numbers even though the situation was spiralling out of control.
Whatever the mitigating circumstances—including the unpopularity of the conflict at home—there is a critical index of Britain's performance: US perceptions. One of the main rationales for joining the invasion was to sustain a close alliance with the US. Yet American officers have been brutally frank: "The short version is that the Brits have lost Basra, if indeed they ever had it," said a source close to Petraeus. The presumption of British superiority thanks to experience in Northern Ireland turned out to be unfounded. Although the British officer corps retains talented individuals, like Iron, the Basra episode has shown systemic failings of operational command.
And this military failure was echoed in a wider political failure to rebuild Basra. There was no economic development plan in place at the start of the invasion and none was implemented. The department for international development's official purpose is the alleviation of global poverty and it was therefore reluctant to become entangled with strategic interests. This was compounded by the opposition of the department's secretary of state, Clare Short, to the invasion—she refused to collaborate with the MoD and foreign office as they prepared for war in 2003.
***
Yet despite this "comprehensive" failure, the Charge of the Knights has salvaged Basra for the British. The danger now is that with the government so focused on withdrawal—the popular option—we may fumble a second chance to get Basra right. British forces will leave the city in June but this should not be an end to our involvement. Basra sits on about $40bn of oil revenue a year; Shell will soon start to sink new oil wells. The city is located at a strategic point, on the Shatt-al-Arab waterway near the Iranian border. It has two ports and a rail link to Baghdad. It is a prime location for investment—and having been there for six years, the British are well positioned to take advantage.
About 300 British soldiers are now organised into military training teams embedded in Iraqi forces around the region, and answering to General Mohan's successor, Major General Mohammed Jowad Huweidi. He has emphasised the need for continued military support, and there is residual respect for the British in Basra. But by June 2009, even these forces will be gone. The only military personnel left in Iraq will be the naval training team in Umm Qasr, some officer cadet trainers and MoD advisers. Not only could the training teams have helped the Iraqi security forces, but they could also have served a useful role in military diplomacy.
The department for business and enterprise should view Basra as a prime opportunity—yet only one representative is now working in the city. Basra's electricity, sewage and rubbish systems will need high levels of foreign investment and British companies should benefit. If Britain does not invest in Basra, others will. The government should not be contemplating disengagement; not least because 178 British soldiers and several thousand Basrawis died fighting there.
Most people in Basra want the British to help rebuild their city. If the Shatt-al-Arab hotel could be restored to the chic elegance of the 1920s, it would be a symbol of Britain's restored reputation in Iraq—and a sign that an unlikely strategic victory had been won from a tactical defeat.
Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect's blog
