Isis in Iraq: Britain Has No Plan For
Tackling The Militants, And No Idea
Who's In Charge
A Commons report revealed last week that
our involvement there is beyond parody
By Patrick Cockburn
February 08, 2015 "ICH"
- "The
Independent"-
- The traumatic experience of Britain’s
participation in the 2003 Iraq war led
the Government to have as little to do
with the country as possible. By the
spring of 2014, as the Islamic State of
Iraq and the Levant (Isis) prepared its
great offensive that would capture a
third of Iraq, the political section of
the British embassy in Baghdad consisted
of just three junior diplomats on
short-term deployment. The British
consulate in Basra, the city that had
been the base for UK military operation
between 2003 and 2007 and is the centre
of Iraq’s oil industry, had been closed
in 2011. Amazingly, Iraq was apparently
a low priority for British intelligence
at a moment when it was becoming obvious
that much of the country was being taken
over by the world’s most violent
terrorist movement.
These facts all come from the well-informed report by
the House of Commons Defence
Committee published last week which
should be read by anybody seriously
interested in Britain’s role in the
war now raging in Iraq and Syria. It
turns out that, for all the British
Government’s bombast about fighting
Isis, it has not bothered to develop
a political and military policy
towards it. This would, in any case,
be difficult to do because
Government has denied itself the
means of knowing what is happening
in Iraq. The committee reports that
even in December 2014, “despite the
UK’s long involvement in Iraq, there
were no UK personnel on the ground
with deep expertise in the tribes,
or politics of Iraq, or a deep
understanding of the Shia militia,
who are doing much of the fighting”.
Here, in one of
the most dangerous places on earth,
Britain has once again become
militarily involved – if only to the
extent of launching one air strike a
day – without knowing what it wants
to do. The report says: “The
committee was shocked by the
inability or unwillingness of any of
the service chiefs to provide a
clear, and articulate statement of
the UK’s objectives or strategic
plan in Iraq. There was a lack of
clarity over who owns the policy –
and indeed whether or not such a
policy exists.”
The service chiefs
in question responded to queries
about what they thought they were up
to in Iraq with some splendid pieces
of waffle and mandarin-speak. Asked
who was responsible for determining
future British actions, Air Chief
Marshal Sir Andrew Pulford, said:
“Well, the answer is that there are
probably about 20 different players
who own different elements of the
comprehensive approach that needs to
be applied in Iraq, in Syria and
right around the region, because of
the multifaceted and multi-natured
nature [sic] of the ultimate
solution, and all the moving parts
that need to go into place.”
Such stuff is impossible
to parody. Of course, there is a simple and
humiliating answer to the question about who
determines policy: the US. The report states
baldly: “Many questions of the ‘mission’, or
strategy, appear to have been left either in
a vacuum between government departments or
left to the international coalition (which
appears to mean the US). We saw no evidence
of the UK Government as a whole seeking to
analyse, question, or change the coalition
strategy, to which it is committed.”
Even supine support for US
policy may not bring solutions. Speaking
before the US Senate Armed Services
Committee in January, retired US General
James Mattis said that in the war against
Isis, the US has a “strategy-free” stance.
At one and the same time it is seeking to
weaken and eliminate Isis, but is also
trying to overthrow President Bashar
al-Assad whose army is the main military
opponent of Isis. The US’s supposed aim is
to install moderate rebels instead of Isis
and Assad, but these barely exist outside a
few pockets.
At senior levels, US
leaders probably do perceive their dilemma
in combating Isis while heading an alliance
that excludes most of those fighting it on
the ground but includes those who helped to
foster the self-declared caliphate. What the
US really thinks about the rise of Isis and
al-Qaeda-type organisations was revealed
with undiplomatic frankness by
Vice-President Joe Biden at a small meeting
at Harvard University last October. Biden’s
words are now almost forgotten, but they
undoubtedly reflect many America leaders’
real take on the situation. He said that
Saudi Arabia, UAE and Turkey “were so
determined to take down Assad and
essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war.
What did they do? They poured hundreds of
millions of dollars and tens of thousands of
tons of weapons into anyone who would fight
against Assad, except that the people who
were being supplied were al-Nusra and
al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of
jihadis coming from other parts of the
world.”
Isis, under pressure in
Iraq, rebuilt its strength by joining the
Syrian revolt. As for the famous “moderates”
who are going to oppose Isis and Assad,
Biden said that “there was no moderate
middle because the moderate middle are made
up of shopkeepers, not soldiers”. Not
surprisingly, when I asked an Iraqi friend
last week what Britain could do to help the
Iraqi government, he replied only
half-jokingly: “Bomb Saudi Arabia!”
Britain is a minor player
in the war in Iraq, but as the Jordanians
discovered to their horror last week, a
minor player may become a major target.
Probably that was one message Isis was
sending by the ritual murder of the
Jordanian pilot. But, going by the report of
Defence Committee, nobody in the British
political and military establishment has
much idea of what is going on in Iraq and
Syria or elsewhere in the region. The
Defence Committee report has various
suggestions about aid for the anti-Isis
governments in Baghdad and Irbil, the
Kurdish capital, which would not cost much
out of a £38bn defence budget. But the most
important part of the report is the demand
for Britain to develop the ability to assess
independently the real situation on the
ground by having “specialists posted
immediately to Iraq to focus separately on
the Sunni communities, the Iraqi security
forces, the Peshmerga, the Shia militia and
Daesh [the Arabic acronym for Isis]”.
Britain remains obsessed
with the Iraq war of 2003 and the finer
points of what happened then, which may (or
may not) be elucidated by the Chilcot
inquiry. But this focus on what happened
more than a decade ago has served as
diversion or smoke screen to hide more
recent but culpable actions by British
political leaders such as David Cameron’s
role in overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi as
leader of Libya in 2011 or seeking to
displace Assad in the years since – both
actions much to the benefit of al-Qaeda-type
groups.
“Political and strategic
preparations must go hand in hand,” Sir Eyre
Crowe, a famed foreign office mandarin,
wrote before the First World War. “Failure
of such harmony must lead either to military
disaster or political retreat.” At the very
least, it will produce some nasty surprises.
Patrick Cockburn is
the author of 'The Rise of Islamic State:
Isis and the New Sunni Revolution' published
by Verso
