Former MI6 deputy chief says we were dragged into Iraq war!

There is an interesting article on the Telegraph website here that reports a speech by Nigel Inkster.

It really does suggest that we only went to war because the evidence was manipulated.

Is the surge working in Iraq?

The short answer is yes though it still has the feel of too little too late.

Sunni tribes are also coming on board but that is more to do with Al Qada being a better recruiting sergeant for the USA than the USA is currently being for them in Iraq. (Which is very much down to the change in tactics brought in by General Patraeus who clearly knows what he is doing and seems to have learned a lot from the British way of doing things whilst we have in part forgotten but have not been able to do because we don't have anything like enough troops to do the job.)

For more on Iraq see here.

The Retreat From Basra. Is it a defeat?

Well, it does depend on how you look at it.

If the victory condition was clearing out Ba'athist forces and liberating Basra, then job done, but that was done in 2003.

If the victory condition was to leave the place in some sort of viable state then this is a abject failure. The Sun leads with the headline "The Lions of Basra" and rightly so, the failure was not of our troops making but our politicians, and indeed American ones. (Article not available online yet)

Our troops have been brave. Very brave. They have also fought well. The trouble is there has never been enough of them and they have not had the support they need.

We have never had the troops on the ground to do the job properly. We also don't have the troops on the ground in Afghanistan either, but that is a whole other disaster waiting to happen.

The Times report here highlights the mixed feelings of people on the ground. Some welcome the "end of the occupation" whilst others are in fear not knowing who will protect them from the militias.

Let us make no mistake here. We chose to go into both Afghanistan and Iraq. Practically we did have to go into Afghanistan, but we have resourced neither sufficiently to do the job.

Jackson's scathing criticism of the USA in Iraq

The Telegraph carries an article today about the forthcoming auto biography of General Sir Mike Jackson, called "Soldier" after 45 years in the army.

The article carries some of the criticisms in his book. Specific areas of complaint are:

• The pentagon was put in charge of post war Iraq.
• That there was no effective plan for post war Iraq, as Donald Rumsfeld had thrown the State departments one in the bin.
• There were not enough troops to bring order. General Jackson estimates we should have had 400,000 yet even in the surge it is proving difficult to reach half that number.
• Disbanding the Iraqi army was a bad idea.

It has to be said I agree with all those criticisms. It was clear that some things were mistakes as they happened and you did not need hind sight to do so. The problem is Donald Rumsfeld did not listen at the time and generals in the Pentagon who disagreed ended up retiring early.

I have my own take on the mess in Iraq which covers more areas, here.

You can read more about Iraq here.

A Strategic Defeat as we prepare to desert the good people of Basra

It is with great regret that I see the situation unfolding in Basra.

The British Army is preparing to leave it to the various militias, who have effective control of the situation on the ground. They have infiltrated the security services at all levels and get training, weaponry and funds from Iran, with, or without the consent of the central government there.

I have been concerned that the basic things not only were not done to secure Iraq in the first place, but have continued not to be done.

So now we have a situation where we are going to leave Basra, with a mission far from accomplished, to descend into chaos. Many people there want us to saty, because they fear the militias. All those people who helped us and hoped we would succeed are now in the firing line.

The problem is that this mission has been under resourced from the start. What is more we have not done anything like enough to control the borders.

Guido has this, Dizzy has this, The Washington Post has this, whilst the Times has this.

For more on Iraq see here.

MOD admits military overstretch

After Sir Richard Dannatt's memo talking of military overstretch was leaked last Sunday a government minister has admitted that the military is a bit stretched. Bob Ainsworth said that the view was both widely spread and known.

"I don't think it's any secret that with the amounts of people we have deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan that there are not huge resources around for contingencies and other things that might arise," he told the Commons defence committee.

That's nice. Any chance of the more resource for our military, and please don't send them into wars your not prepared to pay for.

For more, see yahoo news here.

Hat tip to Yokel for the link.

Failing our troops at the front

I have to say that I am shocked to learn that our troops can take up to 7 hours after being wounded in Afghanistan, and an hour and 50 minutes in Iraq.

This is not how long it takes to get treatment but how long it takes to get them collected from the battlefield. Apparently there is not a dedicated helicopter force to do the job.

The Sunday Telegraph has this, about a report by Lt Col Paul Parker in the Royal Army Medical Corps Journal. It seems that he believes many have died who need not have died for the lack of availability of helicopters dedicated to evacuating the wounded.

It should be noted that whilst we take hours to get a casualty to hospital, in Vietnam the Americans managed to do it on average in 25 minutes. That was 40 years ago.

Whilst the MOD are trying to trash the report Lt Col Paul Parker's colleagues agree, apparently though off the record.

And all this after Tony Blair's promise that our boys in Afghanistan could have whatever they needed. Lying scum.

Iraq: Blair knew there was no plan

According to this article on the front page of the Observer and to a channel 4 documentary next week, Tony Blair knew that there was no plan for post victory Iraq, yet carried on.

I have to say that does not surprise me. It is not hard to tell the neo cons in the White House had not got a clue, which is why I wrote this listing why we are in the mess. Then one of them, Ken Adelman had the chutzpah to blame us for not being hard enough with them!

Another bloody day in Iraq

Up to 200 dead in one day.

An eye witness described seeing a swimming pool of blood.

It need not have been this way.

There could have been a competent plan for the peace.

There was.

It was thrown in the bin.

Shame on you Donald Rumsfeld.

Meanwhile here in the UK, the good folks in New Labour keep asking us to hold the bombers and their backers to account.

We would if we could, but as I understand it, they are not standing for elections in the UK, so how are we supposed to do that?

We will hold to account, a bloody account, the politicians who had a plan for a short war, but no plan for peace. Such arrogance and stupidity must be punished.

I wrote this a long time ago about why we are in this mess in Iraq. Then Ken Adelman, former Assistant Secretary of Defence blamed us for not forcing them to notice how badly the US was doing the job in Iraq, it was our fault, cheeky, but he had a bit of a point.

The BBC has this, and you can read more articles on Iraq here.

The Iran hostage affair, what is going on?

Obviously I am some what angry that our service personnel have effectively been kidnapped on the high seas. I am somewhat perturbed that the Lynx helicopter that was covering the patrol had to return to the Coventry because it was running out of fuel. However lots of other people have provided plenty of comment on that, so I won't go further.

What I did want to say was that the Iranian government does not work the way ours does. There is no central authority with absolute control over all arms. Frankly it is a bit of a mess. President Ahmadinejad controls some aspects but is by no means supreme, he is however closer to the Revolutionary guard than his predecessor. Then their is the revolutionary guard who seem to be able to do some things on their own, like for example instigate this crisis.

The interesting thing about this crisis is the timing. It happened when everyone who was anyone was off on their holidays for the Persian new year. It has apparently been hard to find someone sensible to talk to.

Be thankful that at least our government has some control over our armed forces.

Then there is the other complicating factor. Where is the border? The short answer is apparently that outside of the Shat al Arab it has not actually been agreed, but rather more importantly that in the Shat al Arab it moves as the banks of the delta move.

In the first gulf war the Foreign offices reaction to this complexity was to sanction the interception of shipping whilst it remained in undisputed, preferably international waters as it avoids any doubt.

That does leave two awkward questions.

Why are our helicopters running out of fuel whilst watching over our patrols without a replacement?

Why are we not using a perfectly sensible way of intercepting shipping that we were using 16 years ago?

How our returning soldiers should be treated

Whether you agree with the Iraq or Afghanistan conflicts, our soldiers fight for us, and are prepared to die for us. This surely is how they should be treated when they get home, not left lying in their own excrement in an NHS hospital with people popping by to tell them how bad they are.

Yes I know it is a commercial, but the point still stands.

Hat tip to Iain Dale, who also has it here.

Tony Blair disingenuous over Iraq mess

I could not believe my ears this morning as I listened to Tony Blair's interview on BBC Radio 4's the Today program, with John Humphries.

When asked whether he should apologise for the state of Iraq, or took any responsibility for it he trotted out the line that it was not him, us nor the Americans who were responsible, but the insurgents and extremists.

That is a bit like saying, after all the families valuables have been stolen that it was not the fault of the pratt who left them at the end of the drive for any passer by to steal, but the sole responsibility of the thief. It is of course specious nonsense.

Let us be clear on this, and occupying power has a legal duty and moral responsibility to provide security over the territory it occupies. Blaming people who are against you or who have a vested interest in your failure is childish in the extreme. We knew, or at least ought to have known that there would be those who would try to wreck Iraq. We should have been prepared. We should have secured the borders and ammunition dumps from day one, as well as the infrastructure which was so badly looted. We should have brought in Marshall law from day one, until we had an effective police force to deal with law and order.

There is in fact so much we should have done that we did not do. I wrote about it here.

In fact in an interview with the Telegraph today, here, Sir Jeremy Greenstock echos many of my points. He says:

"In the days following the victory of 9 April [2003] no one, it seems to me, was instructed to put the security of Iraq first. To put law and order on the streets first. There was no police force. There was no constituted army except the victorious invaders.

"And there was no American general that I could … establish who was given the accountable responsibility to make sure that the first duty of any government – and we were the government – was to keep law and order on the streets. There was a vacuum from the beginning in which looters, saboteurs, the criminals, the insurgents moved very quickly."

Yet Tony Blair still seeks to shirk any responsibility. Words fail me. (Well printable ones do at least)

If you want to listen to the ducking and diving of Tony Blair in that interview you can listen again here, or read listeners emails here.

You can read more articles on Iraq here.

That Friendly Fire incident

By now I suspect that you will have seen the cockpit video of the friendly fire incident which caused the death of Lance Corporal of Horse Matty Hull.

Four things strike me.

Firstly the two pilots concerned were US National Guard. Effectively our equivalent of the Territorial army. May be good, but don't train every day.

Secondly they seemed not to know about the orange marking system at all. Probably because of lack of training, so had no means of telling friend from foe. An "accident waiting to happen".

Thirdly their air controller had no clue that our boys were there. There is a huge danger when two armies on the same side are fighting in the same space if there is not the fullest cooperation up and down all chains of command. That is very tricky. NATO forces are supposed to work that way, but these national guards men seemed not to be in the loop.

It looks to me to be half baked training for NATO type operations and a half baked attitude to communication. Just what you would expect of Donald Rumsfeld. I don't think the pilots were to blame, but then I have not seen their training records.

Fourthly and most bizarrely, having had the world, his wife an their pet dog watch the video on TV or the web, the Americans will allow the inquest to see the video but only if it is a closed court. How strange. Giving grieving relatives the run around does not impress me much either.

The BBC has this, whilst the Sun's video is available here.

Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti execution botched

I note that the execution of Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti has been botched.

The trick with hanging is to get the length of the rope right, or else they either die of strangulation if the rope is to short (as used to be the case) or they get their heads ripped off as in this case, if the rope is too long.

The British developed manuals with tables of weights and rope lengths. I understand Malaya still uses them.

Errors were made executing Saddam, this one should have been handled better. The stability of Iraq depends on it.

You can read the BBC article here.

Gordon Brown And Saddam Hussein

Interestingly after john Prescott condemned the nature of the hanging of Saddam Hussein as deplorable last Wednesday, Gordon Brown has joined in agreeing.

In an interview with Andrew Marr to be broadcast tomorrow, he will also describe the nature of the execution as deplorable. Good. Meanwhile Tony Blair remains silent on the issue whilst Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki says he will review relations with any country which criticises the execution. Umm... Well, if there is nothing to criticise, then why hold an enquiry?

Gordon also admits that there have been some mistakes in Iraq policy. It is so jolly good of him to notice. I wonder how that will go down in Washington though. You can see AM with Andrew Marr at 9 AM Sunday the 7th of January, or read the BBC report here or you can do both!

However on the upside, the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki did announce a crack down on all militias no matter how they are connected politically or from what sectarian group they come from. Good I say, lets hope it works. You can read the BBC report here.

John Prescott and Saddam Hussein

I seldom agree with John "Two Shags" Prescott, but here I do.

I do not agree with capitol punishment, but if you are going to execute someone it must be done with some sense of dignity. This clearly was not the case here.

If you are going to execute some one, then the last people the condemned man sees are his hangman and religious minister. Witnesses are kept separate. There is no record other than the official record. No one has a camera other than the official recorder.

The Iraqi government has launched an investigation. Well, it is too late. The horse has already bolted. The man has been hanged, the die has been cast.

Less haste more speed. More brains more success.

You can read the BBC article here.

Saddam Hussein Al Tikriti executed today

Saddam Hussein was executed today. I can't say I will mourn him. He was never nominated for the Novel Peace prize, or Humanitarian of the year. I doubt he will be missed.

However I don't agree with the death penalty. That said he was tried and executed under Iraqi law. Unfortunately he was executed on an Islamic holy day for Sunnis, when prisoners are normally released or pardoned. The timing was wrong.

He also managed to go to the gallows with dignity, in short some sot of propaganda victory for his cause. We do need to learn.

You can read the BBC's article here.

Megaphone conversation goes on, this time from Iraq

I wrote here about what I thought was the bizarre megaphone conversation between Tony Blair and our troops in Afghanistan here. He said they could have what ever they wanted, through the press and the answer came back through the press.

We now have the commander of British forces in Southern Iraq, Major General Richard Shirreff, adding his tuppence worth here.

It appears he feels the armed forces are under resourced. He puts it down to a generation of under funding and to be fair blames both this and past governments.

This all started with the peace dividend. This was the stupid idea that the end of the cold war would lead to a fluffy cuddly world where we did not need quite the military we had before. Of course the cold war was swiftly followed by the first Gulf war, chaos in Somalia and Afghanistan, the Balkan wars and lots of other conflicts.

You would have hoped that at some point in this obvious lack of peace politicians would have stopped taking the peace dividend and realised it was a folly from start to finish, but the fact is that our troops are now engaged in more places at one time than they have been since the Second World war. We just do not have the troop numbers and I don't care what the MOD say, the equipment to do the job at hand.

Not only do we need to look at defence spending again, but it is also clear that we need to un merge some regiments and rebuild our army.

Meanwhile whilst our boys are dying in the field the Defence budget is cut

Yes, according to this story in today's Sunday Telegraph the MOD is looking to save £1 billion.


You just could not make this up.

It should be noted that is to keep the MOD on budget, with cuts already announced rather than a new cut, but it is clear that there is not enough cash being spent on these wars to win them.

Hat tip to Alex on politicalbetting.com for the link.

Iraq a mess Official - The Iraq Study Group report

You can read the report for your self here. It looks like some real Conservatives are taking on the situation and looking to work out a solution.

In many ways of course it is far too late as we need not have got in this mess in the first place. You can read my article on why we are in this mess here, and other articles on Iraq here.

What I was most interested in though was the recognition by the presidential nominee for Secretary of Defence Robert Gates admitting that America was not winning the war in Iraq. Amusingly Tony Blair when asked if he agreed said yes of course. I doubt he would have said that last week

You do have to wonder why it was that Rumsfeld decided to use the minimum number of troops possible to take Iraq. I have a theory that Donald what a pratt Rumsfeld thought that if he could take Iraq on a shoestring in terms of troops the Neo Cons could make the case for effectively building an empire.

What Rumsfeld missed though was that firstly the age of empires is in essence passed and secondly the worlds greatest empire, ours was built on a lot more than force and mouth. It was built on guile, cunning, statecraft, bribery and things that were Machiavelli still alive at the time would have caused him to rewrite his famous work, "The Prince". Of course all Rumsfeld brought to the table was the sort of stupidity that can only be born out of a high intellect and breath taking arrogance.

When I have read the report fully I will comment further.