Financial Times - October 19 2004
UK should reject Iraq troop request
The government of Tony Blair is facing yet more political discomfort over the US request to move British troops up into central Iraq, where overstretched American forces have so far been unable to bring the spreading insurgency in the so-called Sunni triangle under control. Under present circumstances, it is not at all clear this redeployment would help stabilise Iraq. The request should therefore be resisted.
Leaving aside the fact that the Iraq enterprise has made the "war on terror" immensely more difficult to prosecute by swelling the ranks of the jihadis not only in Iraq but across the Arab and Muslim world, the actual conduct of the occupation has been a catastrophe. The strategy was grounded in political fantasy. Implementation has been bungled by a Pentagon unwilling to share control with other US departments let alone allies. There is no clear exit strategy, President George W. Bush's stirring accounts of the onward march of democracy in Iraq notwithstanding. And there is no evidence whatsoever of Britain and Mr Blair being able to influence this misguided policy.
Mr Blair's critics have accused him of trying to help Mr Bush's re-election prospects in two weeks' time. His office has responded that this is about trying to secure the Iraqi election due at the end of next January. While the president will no doubt use the prime minister's further support to pretend he is heading a real coalition, the UK sending one battalion of the Black Watch to Iskandariya and Latifiya will hardly swing the vote in Ohio and Florida. Rather, the troop request should be considered in the light of US strategy in Iraq and whether it is viable.
For the first 15 months of the occupation, the US exhibited a visible fear of democracy in Iraq, resisting calls for early elections to a constituent assembly and cancelling many local polls. During that period, and after the handover of notional sovereignty in June, it has preferred to work through expatriate politicians with little local support. This exclusive political process will not work. But what it will certainly do is expand the ranks of the insurgents.
The US has also serially torpedoed attempts, through selective amnesties for example, to separate nationalist insurgents from jihadis who are opening a new front in their war against the west. Now US forces are preparing an offensive against up to two dozen Sunni towns and cities, where on current practice they will use indiscriminate and disproportionate air power against dense urban areas, causing hundreds of civilian casualties.
That is not something British forces, with a different military culture and rules of engagement, should be part of.
It really is time to move the Iraq debate on, and to focus it on how to secure a decent future for Iraqis. That will not be achieved by Britain buying further into a failed US strategy, which appears to consist of digging the same hole deeper and wider. All that will lead to is an abyss.