EU Referendum

Showing posts with label al amarah. Show all posts

Snatch+attack[i-Snatch+attack]The Times ignores the obvious irony that, on this day of all days – the 70th anniversary of the declaration of war on Germany – it should come up with a headline: "The Army is making in the same old mistakes Afghanistan, say soldiers."

The irony is there in plenty as the first phase of the war against Germany was characterised by the Army making the "same old mistakes", starting with the disastrous campaign in Norway, the chaos which led to the retreat at Dunkirk, the shambolic Greek campaign, the unnecessary loss of Crete and the sequence of defeats in the Western desert, remedied only by el Alamein in 1942 when the 8th Army, fortified by huge stocks of US materiel, managed to prevail against a German force which had over-reached itself.

From a historical perspective, it is probably fair to say that we did not win the Second World War so much as Hitler lost it, not least by his determination to invade Russia, thus tying up 150 divisions which, had they been deployed in Northern France in 1944, would have thrown us back into the sea.

Almost – but not quite repeating history - in Iraq in 2003 – a victorious British Army, having so easily won the war – went on to lose the peace, not having learned, or retained the lessons of previous campaigns, culminating in our abject retreat from Basra and the expulsion of British forces earlier this year, the final act of which has yet to be played out. As before, only the timely intervention of the Americans saved us from a more humiliating rout, which has enabled us to pretend that our occupation actually achieved something.

But now, seeping into the public domain is the slow recognition by the Army that the occupation of Iraq was not "a glowing success, as some within Whitehall and PJHQ [the MoD’s Permanent Joint Headquarters] may try to claim."

That is the view of Daniel Marston, a former senior lecturer in war studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, articulated in the current edition of the British Army Review, a "Restricted" magazine that is not published openly but which Michael Evans of The Times has managed to obtain and report upon.

Thus does he convey the essence, that the Britain Army is failing to learn from the "military mistakes" made in Iraq in developing ways to defeat the Taleban in Afghanistan, according to a series of critical articles published in an internal army journal.

Dare we say it, but that is exactly the thesis we offer in Ministry of Defeat which, from the limited review that Evans offers us, goes far beyond that which the Army is yet ready to admit.

We do get from Marston, though, that "Observers expected that the British forces going into Afghanistan and Iraq, given their history of success in counter-insurgency, would automatically be better suited to waging wars among the people than their American counterparts."

But then he says that: "The British Army, in practice, appeared to be losing its way in terms of practical application of key facets of COIN [counter-insurgency] ... Many officers and NCOs ... were apparently unaware of important operational and strategic aspects of COIN. The British Army cannot turn its back on a difficult campaign and disregard lessons, some of which are admittedly very tough to swallow ... ".

We also learn from Evans that there is condemnation in the journal of Britain’s strategy in Iraq, particularly the decision to withdraw troops from Basra in September 2007, leaving the city to be taken over by extremist Shia militia. This, we are told, echoes criticisms made by senior American commanders at the time, which were rejected by the Government.

But, if that is as far as the criticism goes, then they are not there yet. As we never tire of saying, the strategic rot started with the decision to abandon al Amarah in 2006 (the picture is from 2005 in Alamarah), which set the pattern for the retreat which continued into Basra. Yet so few people – even amongst the troops who were in theatre at the time – knew what was going on that it is unsurprising that the full implications of that decision are not yet fully understood.

Even with the limited and highly controlled criticisms in the journal, however, Gen Dannatt admits in a foreword that the articles "make uncomfortable reading" but, we are told, "he welcomes the debate." Of course, the debate has barely started and, if it was that welcome, the brave General might have done more to promote it while he was still in office.

He does "reveal" though that a review of doctrine applied in Iraq and Afghanistan, called "Operation Entirety", has already helped "to focus the Army on the enduring campaign in Afghanistan". That review will be published soon, we learn.

Yet this is the review that has been six years in the making and, to judge from the lacklustre strategy being applied in Afghanistan, by no means all the lessons from Iraq have been either acknowledged or learned. But since it would appear that only now is the Army beginning to allow muted criticisms in a "Restricted" document, it has a long, long way to go before we get to the bottom of the failures in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

With historians still chewing over the entrails of the Second World War, it may be some time yet before we get to grips with the extent of those failures, leaving Trooper David Maddock in the current journal to put down a marker.

He declares: "British forces in Afghanistan today are fighting an asymmetric war, a war we have fought many times before in Arabia, Malaya, Northern Ireland and Iraq ... If we have such a vast amount of experience, why are we not implementing the lessons learnt by those who have fought and died before us?"

But the last word has to go to US Colonel Peter Mansoor, who says that, "Only through a thorough appreciation of the mistakes it made in Iraq can the British Army turn defeat into victory as it fights the untidy wars of the early 21st century. It should not ... gloss over its recent experience in Iraq ... Although the conditions [in Afghanistan] are different, the lessons of Iraq are still relevant."

"The British failure in Basra was not due to the conduct of British troops, which was exemplary. It was, rather, a failure by senior British civilian and military leaders to understand the political dynamics ... in Iraq, compounded by arrogance that led to an unwillingness to learn and adapt, along with increasing reluctance to risk blood and treasure to conduct effective counter-insurgency warfare ... ".

That arrogance is still there, in spades, and all we are seeing is the smallest of cracks in the edifice. But it is a start, even if it risks being too little, too late. We cannot afford 70 years before we finally admit that mistakes were made. And nor can we afford the luxury of dwelling on those events all those years ago, while ignoring the present.

COMMENT THREAD

Snatch+LR+001[i-Snatch+LR+001]Picked up by The Sun and The Daily Mail is the story of John Salisbury-Baker, the MoD press officer who is suing the ministry for being forced to tell the public "lies" about the war in Iraq.

He is claiming that the trauma of having to "defend the morally indefensible" – such as "telling the media that army vehicles such as Snatch Land Rovers were equipped to withstand roadside bombs" has given him post-traumatic stress disorder.

What comes over from the detail is the way press officers were used to "hold the line" and to keep embarrassing comments away from the media.

Salisbury-Baker was employed at York's Imphal Barracks and it was his job was to visit bereaved families immediately after they had been told that "their loved ones were dead."

Ostensibly there to provide the families with "a shield" to help them deal with media interest after the deaths had been made public, his real job was to act as a minder, to "steer them away from sharper questions from reporters about equipment."

His partner Christine Brooke has made a statement on his behalf, saying that said: "John is an honest, sensitive and moral person and having to peddle Government lies that soldiers in vehicles such as the Snatch Land Rovers were safe from roadside bombs has made him stressed."

She adds that, "He was particularly plagued by the thought that some of the bereaved families he was visiting might have previously believed their loved ones were safe because of what he himself had said to the media ... He felt responsible. He felt he was having to defend the morally indefensible. The vehicles clearly did not give adequate protection from bombs."

Speaking earlier with Sue Smith, mother of Pte Philip Hewett, who was killed in a Snatch in al Amarah in 2005, she told me this only confirmed what they (her family) knew at the time – that the MoD had been consistently lying to them about the safety of the Snatch. Her own Army visiting officer, she learned, had been given instructions to "shut that woman up".

Many people with dealings with the MoD media officials often wondered how their press officers could sleep at night. Now, it appears, one of them could not. Salisbury-Baker has been diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and is pursuing a claim for disability discrimination on the grounds that the stress of what he was being asked to do effectively made him disabled.

Needless to say, an MoD spokesman said it would be "inappropriate" to comment at this stage. That must be the nearest thing to the truth the MoD has been for a long while.

COMMENT THREAD

Frontline[i-Frontline]
One of the penalties of being exiled to Bradford, 200 miles from the metropolis is that for what is a Londoner, an evening with an early return home becomes a major expedition – requiring forward planning, considerable expense and much exhaustion, not least because one tends to cram in as much as possible into the day to make the trip worth it.

Thus, the Frontline Club talk yesterday, which started at 7 pm began for me at 6.30 in the morning and ended up, after a grueling 400-mile round trip, with me falling into my pit at 5 am this morning, having driven through atrocious weather, a barrage of road works and a thicket of speed cameras, the verdict from which has yet to be delivered.

Inevitably, therefore, such a concentrated diet of impressions takes a considerable amount of digestion before a coherent view can be formed. It says something though, that earlier in the day, I had given a talk about the book to a small gathering at a private lunch and my attempt to give the "short" version, with some insight into the political ramifications, took an hour and a half. Yet there I was at the Frontline club expected to give an overview in 20 minutes and then take part in a panel discussion for an hour or so, covering the same territory.

Originally billed with General Sir Mike Jackson on the panel, he pulled out at the last minute, for reasons unexplained (apparently he has a reputation for that). The meeting was thus chaired by Bill Neely, foreign editor for ITN News, with the panel comprising myself, Kim Sengupta from The Independent and with Deborah Haynes, defence correspondent from The Times standing in for Gen Jackson.

To a packed audience, with standing room only (close to a hundred people), I chose to focus the talk very tightly on just one aspect of the British occupation of Iraqi – the lack of appropriate equipment – which, I averred, contributed significantly to the military defeat. Much to the concern of the management, who discourage the use of Powerpoint presentations, I chose to illustrate the presentation with pictures of key equipment and despite the reservations, it seemed to work well enough.

Memory then is a faulty instrument; players always find it hard to describe the action. But, of the contributions from the audience – including two passionate Iraqi expats – there is and will continue to be that difficulty in unravelling those two separate (albeit linked) episodes of the invasion and the subsequent occupation. Many of the questions were thus focused on the invasion and issues related to that.

That further reinforced by the response today to the launch of the Chilcot Inquiry, where it is clear that Tony Blair is to be the star of the show in what looks as if it will become a media three-ring circus.

As to my general thesis – that the occupation of Iraq was a military failure – there was in fact a strong measure of agreement from the panel and the chairman, and indeed a view that many of the same mistakes are being repeated in the campaign in Afghanistan, about which there was very little confidence expressed. It there was a consensus view, it is most definitely that the Military is paving the way for another glorious defeat.

The impressive Kim Sengupta disagreed that the lack of equipment was the primary factor in the failure of the British, arguing that the root cause was the arrogance in the Military, a belief that they knew it all, and a rooted obstinacy in refusing to learn any lessons from the experience.

A former soldier in the audience added his voice, referring to the retreat from al Amarah - which I had identified as the pivotal moment in the failure of the campaign – saying that the campaign had been lost long before. By then there was no political will to continue with an aggressive prosecution of the counter-insurgency action.

Not disputing any of these views, I made the point that the lack of equipment was symptomatic of that greater malaise. I offered my own thesis - not unfamiliar to readers of this blog – that military equipment is the window into the soul of the Army.

Look at the equipment an army fields (and does not field) and that will tell you how they intend to fight. You do not need to interview the generals as to their intentions – they are revealed in the order of battle, in which context the continued use of the Snatch Land Rover told a story more eloquent than a brace of self-serving memoirs.

The Army, in effect, was telling you its own story, there to see if you understood the language. It illustrated the points made and was symbolic evidence of them.

Chairman Bill Neely neatly put Deborah Haynes on the spot, asking her why the media did not pay more attention to equipment. Her view, if I have recorded it accurately, was that equipment alone was not "very sexy" and it was not until there were "body bags" to go with it, as had been the case with the Snatch Land Rover, that it became a story.

This precisely accords with the impression that I have formed of the way the media thinks. If I did hear correctly, then it is a stunning confirmation of part of my thesis on media behaviour.

Neely himself invited me to explore by broader thesis on the failure of the media, noting that, while I had criticised the British media, I had relied extensively on British sources for my book. My point was that, while much of the information supplied was valuable, I had found that I had not been able to assemble from the British media any sense of a narrative of the conduct of the occupation. I had had to trawl many different sources, the most valuable – in helping me construct a framework – being the Arab press and insurgent sources.

Thus, as far as it goes, the British media offered many reports, but failed entirely in presenting a factual narrative which would put the material in the broader context. In that sense, I told Neely, Sengupta and Haynes afterwards, a rounded account is like a string of pearls. They had provided many pearls (and some dross) but not the "string" with which to bind them into a coherent whole.

Anyhow, those were my first – or at least, abiding – impressions of the meeting. There was much, much more and I hope that, should the video of the meeting become available, I will be able to do a much more comprehensive review of what was a fascinating event.

COMMENT THREAD

Sue+Smith+001[i-Sue+Smith+001]Today, which may prove to be a turning point in more ways than one, saw a partial success by Sue Smith in her ongoing battle with the Ministry of Defeat to gain a proper inquiry into the use of the Snatch Land Rovers – in one of which her son, Private Phillip Hewett, was killed in al Amarah on 16 July 2005.

According to The Times and others, in the High Court, Mr Justice Mitting gave Susan Smith permission to bring a judicial review challenge to the decision of Bob Ainsworth, the Defence Minister, not to hold a public inquiry into the past use of these vehicles.

This is, of course, only the first step in the proceedings. There must now be a full hearing, when the arguments will be heard as to whether the minister was wrong in rejecting demands for an inquiry. Only if that is successful will the current defence secretary – also Bob Ainsworth – be required to re-examine the grounds for rejecting an inquiry. Even then, he may simply move the goalposts and come up with new and additional reasons for a rejection.

Already, the battle lines have been re-drawn slightly in that the judge refused Sue permission to challenge the future use of the vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan. The minister did so on advice from military experts and his decision and reasons were "completely unimpeachable".

But, as to past use, he said there were insufficient reasons given for their use and it was at least arguable that he should have granted a public inquiry. With 38 soldiers having been killed in Snatches, the minister had not given adequate reasons why they had not replaced by more heavily armoured vehicles.

Sue is, of course, delighted and, even if the case does not succeed in the full hearing, it is partial vindication of her stance and many others of us. There is a case to answer, a case the Army have insisted has already been answered – as indeed have ministers. It is a reflection of the paucity of their arguments that they so far have not prevailed.

In fact, they do not have a case in our view. The Army from the very first knew full well that the Snatch was not capable of protecting from the types of bomb being used against them, and that the countermeasures available were entirely ineffective. It was not a matter of chance, therefore – or of misfortune – that men were going to die. And although it was inevitable, the Army sent them out.

The rationale, at the time, was that the size of the Snatch was such that only it could reach all the places which needed patrolling and then that its profile was such that it was an essential part of the "hearts and minds" campaign which the Army thought would win over the insurgents.

Neither of those elements was true in Hewett's case and in many others. The ground his patrol was covering was later covered by Warriors and eventually Challenger tanks, when the situation had deteriorated still further. As for "hearts and minds", this was a "combat patrol" carried out in the small hours of the morning, in total darkness, aimed at deterring mortar attacks on the nearby base in Abu Naji.

Any reasonable outcome, had the patrol been successful in interdicting mortar teams, would have involved at the very least, a contact battle. And, as an offensive patrol, there was every expectation that the insurgents might seek to attack it. Thus, men were being sent to do battle in a flimsy Land Rover designed for the streets and lanes of Northern Ireland.

Whichever way the ministers and the Army now play it, their cards are marked. For too long, these arrogant and sometimes stupid fools have taken it upon themselves unnecessarily to send men out to die and then regarded themselves as above challenge.

Sue Smith – not some grand General, or preening, over-paid politician – says otherwise. "This is not just for me," she says. "Several other families who lost sons also want to know why? I accept that this is just the first small step but it is nice to know we are being listened to."

"Nice," is not quite the word I would have chosen, and I suspect Sue might have said something different out of the earshot of the reporters. But it is good enough.

COMMENT THREAD

link[i-link]It was never the case that the MoD was going to take the charge of lying without attempting a comeback and, sure enough, after Stephen Grey's piece in The Guardian that we looked at last week, Nick Gurr, the MoD's Director of Media and Communications, has tried his hand at a rebuttal on the MoD website.

Addressing the issues that the "MOD is restricting access to conflict zones" and that journalists have been "lied to and censored", Gurr deals with each in turn.

The points he makes on the access issue look eminently reasonable, stating the obvious – that air transport to theatre is limited and that there is an increasing demand for media access, which cannot be met. Gurr would have it that the MoD is doing its best, the number of media visits to operational theatres (Iraq and Afghanistan) having increased from 152 in the year to Oct 2007 to 246 in the year to May 2009. For Afghanistan during the same period they rose from 90 to 116 - an increase of more than 25 percent.

What Gurr does not say though is that much of the increase is through a programme of encouraging reporters from regional and local papers to follow their home regiments – ranks of very often inexperienced and compliant journalists, many of whom (not all) who lack specialist knowledge and thus are easy prey for the military propaganda machine.

An example of this comes with a recent piece from Harry Miller of the Surrey Comet, writing about a re-supply mission to a patrol base 2km west of the Musa Qala District Centre.

He travels with the 3 Scots in "some of the newly delivered Jackal armoured vehicles, used for reconnaissance, rapid assault, fire support and convoy protection." These, presumably, are the Jackal 2s, the virtues of which Miller extols, telling us that, "The new design of the vehicles has meant that Improvised Explosive Devices are having less of the desired effect and crews are much more likely to survive the impact with only minimal injuries."

Following on from Harding's piece on 1 June, expressing "safety concerns" about the Jackals, no self-respecting specialist defence correspondent would have written such an uncritical piece.

For the MoD to have got Miller to have written such a glowing testament – which could only have been repeating what he had been told – was, therefore, something of a coup, representing hard core propaganda from an unwitting journalist.

Yet, four days after the piece was published, Major Sean Burchall was killed – the most senior British Army officer to date in Afghanistan – in a Jackal. It may well have been a Jackal 2. Yet, while the MoD is happy to see "puffs" for the Jackal, when it comes to bad publicity for the machine, the MoD website is curiously silent.

Throughout the piece on Burchall's death, there is no mention of the Jackal, reference being made only to "armoured vehicles", a description which would not normally be applied to this equipment.

To favour relatively impressionable reporters, which then justifies restricting more frequent access by experienced journalists, and then to omit details of the Jackal in the press release, cannot be called lying or anything so obvious. But these are nonetheless classic examples of how the MoD seeks to manipulate the message to the public.

Gurr, however, claims that the MoD "wants the media to see first hand the efforts of our forces in Afghanistan", to which effect he argues that "our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines are our best advocates," on which basis it is "in our interests to get the media there to see it for themselves." We owe it to our forces to ensure their story is told, adds Gurr.

In fact, though, the MoD's prime concern is to get the media to report the "story" it wants them to report. Those journalists who are compliant find that the MoD cannot be too helpful. Those who question the official line find that all sorts of difficulties arise when they want access to theatre or want to talk to people on the ground.

If this is the subtle – and deniable – end of media control, the plain lie is also a tool of the trade. But, to be credible, the lie must be denied. Thus does Gurr aver, "We don't tell lies. We are not allowed to." Of course, this is a lie.

We have far too many examples of outright lies from the MoD to believe otherwise – from the denial that there was major fighting in al Amarah during the height on the Mahdi uprising in 2005, to the false expectations raised on the conduct of Operation Sinbad in late 2007 to the falsehoods perpetrated over the recovery of Musa Qala, pretending that it was an Afghan-led operation.

The strict definition of the lie, however, encompasses more than just the telling of an untruth. It takes in not only the act, but default or sufferance – the processes of allowing untruths to be perpetuated for want of interventions that would correct them.

These are the common fare of the MoD but its tenuous grasp of the meaning of truth leads it further down the path of deception than can be imagined. One classic – and frequently employed stratagem – is to keep quiet about operations which would be of interest to specialists, using its own staff or journalists to cover the events and then only to publish the details if they go to plan – whatever the plan was.

That was the strategy adopted with Operation Sond Chara (Operation Red Dagger), over Christmas last. No embeds were present through the whole operation and only a very carefully sanitised version was released to the public.

The same goes, of course, for the deaths of individual soldiers. Stephen Grey complained that there was less coverage of British deaths than they deserve because the MOD was not getting journalists to the front line. Gurr disagrees, declaring that his organisation produces detailed eulogies "for all our people who are killed in action." That might be the case but, as we have seen with Major Burchall, the releases published by the MoD rarely include any significant operational detail.

For all Gurr's protests, though, he himself is most revealing about the real agenda. "There is a good story to be told in Afghanistan about all the things our forces are achieving in the toughest part of the theatre," he writes. "We want this story told and we want journalists there to help tell it." The journalists are there to tell the "good" story, and it is Gurr's job to make that happen.

COMMENT THREAD

al+Amarah+explosion2[i-al+Amarah+explosion2]Already, the media is second-guessing the Iraq inquiry, with The Times leading the fray.

Of four questions posed by defence editor Michael Evans, however, only one relates to the occupation, confirming that the media is going to be obsessed with the run-up to the war, rather than the occupation. And even then, the single question directed at the occupation is so limited in scope that it indicates nothing more than the narrowness of the perspective. Thus does Evans ask:

Why was the size of the British force in Iraq progressively reduced even though the troops there were coming under daily attack by an increasingly well-armed and well-trained extremist militia?

During 2005, 2006 and 2007 there were never enough troops to protect the Iraqi citizens living in Basra, and control of the city began to fall into the hands of the Iranian-backed Shia hardliners. By September 2007, the 500 remaining troops based inside the city were under such pressure that there was little alternative but to withdraw them to the relative safety of the airbase northwest of the city, leaving Basra to the mercy of the extremists.

What debate was going on in Whitehall at this time? Who, if anyone, was arguing that more, not fewer, troops were needed to safeguard the lives of Iraqis living in Basra, let alone the British soldiers themselves? Was anyone warning that the withdrawal of the last troops inside Basra might lead to a take-over by the Shia extremists and that this would be interpreted — by the Americans and by historians — as a defeatist move by the British, one which did no favours for the reputation of the British Army?

The questions, superficially, look sound enough, but they miss the point. In common with most of his contemporaries, Evans focuses unduly on Basra. Yet, any careful analysis of the campaign will suggest that the rot started not in Basra but with the desertion of al Amarah in August 2006. Arguably, had the base at Abu Naji been held, and the training and support of the 12th Division continued, Iraqi forces backed by the British could eventually have recovered the city.

For the British to have retained their foothold in the Abu Naji, however, two things were needed: the Army had to restore tactical mobility and then had to acquire the capability to deal with the indirect fire which was making that base untenable. Both were essentially equipment issues, reflecting procurement failures and High Command decisions rather than a lack of troops.

In this context, it is germane to note that, when the Iraqi Army subsequently recovered al Amarah in the operation called "promise of peace", starting in May 2008, it was heavily supported by US troops, without which the operation would not have been possible. The total commitment of US troops to Maysan province, however, never exceeded 2,500 – a fraction of the number of troops available to the British.

This demonstrates that troop numbers, although an issue in the early stages of the occupation, was not the decisive factor. What mattered was the equipment, the tactics and the timing, particularly in respect of the political developments which enabled prime minister Maliki to take on the Mahdi Army and defeat it.

You can, of course read the full story in Ministry of Defeat, without waiting for the outcome of the inquiry. This is the book that the media and the military are determined to bury.

Our publicist, appointed by the publisher and highly experienced in marketing books, has never before known such resistance to a book. And before committing his time an effort to the book, he made his own enquiries, sending copies to "senior ministry persons" for comment.

One told us that the book should be "compulsory reading" for all students at Sandhurst. They should be invited to state their reasons why the book was wrong, our source said, but they would find it very difficult to do. Most Army officers, he said, would agree in private with the thesis of the book, but none would admit it publicly. "There is a major cover-up going on," he added.

Although some details may be wrong, the book tells the substantive and hitherto untold story of the Iraqi occupation. That it should be told by an outsider is intolerable to the media, which comprehensively called it wrong, just as Evans is doing now. The inquiry is faced with a difficult job as there are many vested interests keen to see it get the wrong answers.

It will be interesting to see whether they prevail.

COMMENT THREAD

SNATCH-ONEs[i-SNATCH-ONEs]Today, there is considerable celebration amongst a small, badly neglected group of people at the Appeal Court ruling just handed down. This has determined that soldiers on operations overseas retain their protection under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which safeguards the right to life.

The result of the ruling, as The Times records (and others here and here), is that families of British troops killed in war zones may be able to sue the government for a breach of human rights.

That "badly neglected group" who are so pleased with this ruling comprises the relatives – including the mothers, fathers, husbands, wives and even grandparents – of soldiers killed in action, almost all of whom feel let down by the system and deserted by the very people who are supposed to be there to help them.

Amongst them is Sue Smith, mother of Pte Philip Hewett who was killed with two others in a Snatch Land Rover in al Amarah on 16 July 2005, the circumstances of which we have recorded in several posts (such as this one, plus this).

Sue – like many others - has since spent many years battling to seek justice for her son and has a court case pending, suing the MoD for negligence, a case which was awaiting the outcome of this judgement. The way is not clear yet, as permission has been given to take the case to the House of Lords - granted on condition that the Secretary of State for Defence pays the legal costs whether the plaintiffs win or lose. But this is a significant step forward.

Sue's point – which I heartily endorse – is that the Army, for local political reasons, knowingly and with "malice of forethought" sent men out in highly vulnerable Snatches, fully aware that these vehicles provided no protection whatsoever against the weapons that were being deployed against them, in circumstances where there was an extremely high risk that they would be attacked and killed.

This goes way beyond the normal risks of war where commanders at all levels failed in their most basic duties to protect the lives of the troops under their command, when simple, basic precautions and adequate equipment could have protected them.

As with the original decision handed down in April 2008 by Mr Justice Collins sitting at the High Court in London, there will probably be talking heads bemoaning this judgement, arguing that the Courts have no place in the battlefield. Already, some senior commanders are complaining that they will lose control over their own men, as tactical decisions – and orders – are questioned on "health and safety" grounds.

In principle, it is hard not to disagree with these sentiments but the upshot is that the Army and the MoD have largely brought it on themselves. Had they responded intelligently – and decently – to the very real and well-founded concerns of relatives, instead of "dead batting" them and then relying on their presumed exemption from human rights law, none of this would have happened. Not one of the relatives wanted to go to law, but the attitude of the authorities left them with no choice.

In that context, we see a very measured and sensible response in The Daily Telegraph.

But there is another player here, which also failed the relatives – and the men and women who died, and will die. That is Parliament. There will be few, I vouch, who will make the connection with this case, but the fact is that Parliament has a responsibility here.

Uniquely, soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines are bound by law to put their lives at risk and occasionally forfeit them, in serving the interests of the state. In so doing the state – as represented by the government – has a duty of care, moral if not legal. But the primary body charged with scrutinising the government and bringing it to account is Parliament. Given that service personnel are unable to speak openly on their own account, Parliament thus has that special duty to look after their interests.

Unfortunately, almost without exception, where bereaved relatives have gone to their constituency MPs for aid and some succour, they have found them to be useless. For sure, they get the ritual expressions of sympathy and promises of help, but nothing ever materialises.

At another level, never has the defence committee specifically looked at the issue of mine protected vehicles, or force protection in general and, in respect of many of the substandard vehicles used or bought by the Army, the committee has actually welcomed uncritically their introduction.

Then, at the higher political level, there has been an infuriating and utterly irresponsible tendency of the opposition to use equipment deficiencies as a stick with which to beat the government, scoring political points rather than seeking to resolve problems.

To understand why this is so objectionable, one has to get past the Janet and John view of politics – the one that has the secretary of state in total control, making all the decisions and taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong.

Many former ministers will attest to how little power they actually have in office and often how difficult it is to impose even minor changes in their departments. This is especially so with the Ministry of Defence, where there are powerful vested interests, in the civil service, in the military and in the defence contractor lobby. It is rare that ministers can take on the combined weight of their own departments and win, if there is embedded an outright refusal to change. That is real life.

Here, one of the greatest allies a minister has is Parliament – both his own MPs and, especially, the opposition. While his department might seek to frustrate his wishes, when there is a strong sentiment from parliament that things should change, the hand of the minister is immeasurably strengthened. If, however, the MPs insist on turning criticism into party, partisan scoring points, that is of no help at all.

For sure, politicians are there to score points off each other, but in terms of defence – where the lives of service personnel at risk – the duty of MPs as parliamentarians should transcend party interest. Their duty to those at risk comes first. That is why, indeed, we maintain the title of "Her Majesty's loyal opposition".

In all respects, Parliament – at an individual level, with a very few honourable exceptions - has failed to step up to the plate. At an institutional level it has completely failed. This is an abject failure.

So, for want of Parliament doing its job, relatives today are rejoicing that a court of law has done it for them. In the end, we hope justice will be done, but the fact that it will have to come from the courts rather than Parliament is another – and very serious – indictment of that failing and increasingly useless institution.

COMMENT THREAD

Basra+retreat[i-Basra+retreat]
By linking the final stage of our ignominious retreat from Iraq with a memorial service, honouring the British troops who were killed, the military and government both thereby achieve the effect of blunting criticism of the war.

Any such criticism, especially of the military, can easily be dismissed as heartless or insensitive, given that so many have put themselves in harm's way and many have paid the ultimate price.

Given also that this current government is in a terminal stage of decay, it is thus easier to focus attention on the political failures – of which there were many – staying any criticisms of the military, for fear of offending the sensibilities of those who knew or were related to the fallen.

There is also a strong political element here as well. The manifest failures in Iraq serve as a useful stick to beat the current government and to enjoin the military as partners in a collective failure dilutes the attack on the politicians. It is thus tactically advantageous the position the military as innocent "victims" of political machinations, rather than clinically to apportion blame where it lies.

The fact is though, however much it is spun, the counter-insurgency campaign in Iraq was a British failure and the responsibility for that failure lies both with the politicians and the military.

Where exactly that dividing line lies has yet to be determined and it will be many years and take much study and argument before all the issues have been rehearsed and the final resolution reached – if ever. I have made an attempt at an analysis in my book, Ministry of Defeat, due out in June.

In it, I readily acknowledge that, as a second draft of history, it will have flaws, but it is an honest and so far the only attempt to chart the complete history of the British occupation of Iraq.

Of the coverage in the media today, the Evening Standard best cuts through the cant, with a comment piece headed "Our inglorious retreat from Iraq", noting that, even allowing for the professionalism of British forces, innumerable acts of courage on the part of individuals and high aspirations from their commanders, the reputation of the Army has been diminished, not enhanced, in southern Iraq.

This supports a piece by Andrew Gilligan under the title: "The lessons of Basra are: do something properly or not at all". In this piece, however his focus is on the events of Basra, and thus lacks the historical context of the campaign as a whole, where the seeds of defeat were not sown in Iraq's second city but earlier in al Amarah.

Thus does Gilligan aver that Basra was a historic humiliation for the British Army a shaming contrast to the behaviour of the Americans, who also suffered reverses in their sector of Iraq but reinforced, fought back strongly and eventually prevailed.

In this blinkered fashion, he then argues "It wasn't the Army's fault: our soldiers are no cowards. It was the politicians in London who gave up, not the frustrated troops on the ground. Where there is, however, fault on the military side is in their current attempts, publicly at least, to deny the reality of the operation that ended today."

Gilligan is wrong in one sense. It was the Army's fault – in part at least. Although the politicians seen the framework for defeat, the situation up to mid-2006, with inspired leadership and more intelligence and flexibility than was shown, was recoverable.

But where Gilligan is right is in pinpointing the attempts of the military to spin the operation as a success. That denies the opportunity of conducting a frank, open and searching post mortem and thus limits the ability of the military to learn the lessons from its own mistakes – some of which it is currently repeating in Afghanistan.

Acknowledging failure, as Aaron Wildavsky once wrote, allows for the concept of "useful" failure. Citing the engineer Henry Petrovski in his support, in the context of civil engineering disasters, he noted:

...the lessons learned from (those) disasters can do more to advance engineering knowledge than all the successful structures in the world. Indeed, failures appear to be inevitable in the wake of prolonged success, which encourages lower margins of safety. Failure in turn leads to greater margins of safety and, hence, new periods of success.

What applies to engineering applies to the military, as it does all other walks of life. The absence of information on failure leads, in the long run, to increased risk of failure. The risk of failure in the future is too high for us not to acknowledge and learn from the failures of our past.

COMMENT THREAD

click to enlarge[i-click to enlarge]
Increasing government control of information – and its control of the agenda – has been almost the defining developments of the New Labour era, characterised by the oft-repeated accusations of "spin" levied at our masters.

But "spin" is only the most visible and obvious part of a huge government machine, which employs a vast range of subtle – and some not so subtle – tools to keep control. All government departments use these tools, from agriculture (DEFRA), through environment to defence and beyond.

Whenever you start probing government activities, you will come across the machine. Mostly though, at the receiving end, you will only see tiny pieces of the jigsaw – or feel the effects. Most often, when you bump up against the restraints, so subtle are they that very few even recognise them for that they are.

However, while they do indeed affect the whole range of government activities, they are perhaps most visible (or detectable) in the defence establishment – not least because it has a valid reason for keeping some of its activities secret. But this also reflects that, of all the departments, it is one of the best practised and most developed in the art of dissimulation.

Nevertheless, in following the defence agenda – and latterly in writing the book Ministry of Defeat - I have become more aware of some of the techniques used. In what is going to have to be a series of posts, therefore, we thought it might be useful to identify some of them, used – with or without variations - in all departments of state to maintain our "secret society". In this post, we will look at some of the mechanisms for controlling the media.

Taking it from the top, the most obvious way of controlling the flow of information is to say nothing. This is still a standard technique. Even to this day, it is massively effective, to whit the events in the city of al Amarah in Maysan province, Iraq, in May through August 2004.

Throughout that period, there were a series of intense battles going on, amounting to all-out war between the British and the Mahdi Army, yet the massive scale of the conflict went completely unreported at the time – unreported because the MoD simply said nothing about it.

However, the truth – as they say – will always out. With such events, someone will always know something, and there will always be leaks. These cannot be prevented, so they must be contained. And it is here that the machine works at its most effective, with an increasingly subtle range of strategies employed.

The first and most effective tool is outright denial, close-coupled with the age-old device called "lying". Thus, when the fighting did break out in al Amarah, and word began to leak out, the first response of the MoD was simply to deny that there was heavy fighting, dismissing the fragmented reports as "isolated incidents", and downplaying their importance.

Here, choice of words become vital, as part of the overall technique. An attack on a convoy, for instance, becomes described as a "security incident", it is always an "isolated incident" and the duration limited. Thus, whenever the news leaks out – and however bad it was – the then current situation will always be described as being "calm and stable" or in similar terms.

One of the great advantages the MoD and the military have here is the control over access. In the al Amarah affair, with the city being in hostile territory some 200 miles or so north of Basra, journalists were totally reliant on the military for the physical means of getting there. And those journalists who asked to be taken to al Amarah were simply told there were no transport resources, or even more bluntly, simply "no".

For those journalists who persevere, the "big stick" can be used – and it is used. The first is the Official Secrets Act. Information will be classified and the journo will simply be told they cannot publish it or they will be in breach.

More often though – where the OSA cannot really be justified - a system called the "D-advisory" is used, the system which replaces the D-Notice system. journalists (or their editors) are "requested" not to publish certain information. Most editors will abide by this and, even if they do not, they will check out the options and that will often delay publication past the danger period and reduce the impact.

If a journalist still perseveres, the military can then invoke the "green book" which is "produced in consultation with editors and press and broadcasting organisations", where they can be required to "submit their material for security checking and to undertake not to publish any operationally sensitive material". And, of course, all journos are required to sign the declaration illustrated above.

It is here that the MoD has the ultimate sanction, as any breach of this "voluntary" agreement means that the journalist concerned will lose accreditation, whence all facilities are withdrawn. We will discuss this further in later posts, but it is something of a blunt instrument which itself can make a story, as the journalist then has nothing to lose.

More generally, therefore, other more subtle layers of controls come into play. One of these is the "trade", of which there are many variations. The most straightforward is to trade delay for detail. A journo may have only a small part of the story so the deal is that, if publication is held up, a "full" briefing will be given and the journo is then free to publish, on the basis of what they have been told.

Sometimes, this will be further sweetened by a promise of exclusivity, or a head start over the competition, so that the journo can break an "exclusive" days before his rivals.

The trade, however, often extends to content as well as timing. The exclusion of embarrassing rather than operationally sensitive material can be traded for access to high level contacts. Omission of a paragraph about a cock-up, for instance, can be swapped for a juicy "insider" quote from a field commander – or higher – on an exclusive basis.

For a journalist that is prepared to resist such blandishments, however, there are other techniques. One is pre-emptive publishing. Other journos may be given carefully tailored details early, which are withheld from the offender, allowing the rivals to go ahead with a sanitised version of the story, thus spiking the "scoop".

These, though, are only the more obvious controls. There are many more, and we will look at some of those in the next post.

COMMENT THREAD

jackal+444[i-jackal+444]Despite being sent early drafts (at their request), at the eleventh hour - as the book is about to go into production, fully typeset and indexed - we get a formal "request" from the MoD to remove several passages on the grounds that they breach "OPSEC" (Operational Security).

One passage to which the MoD took great exception recounted how a soldier discovered an IED (aka roadside bomb) in al Amarah, detailing what he saw that made him suspicious. We have been asked to remove this because, "As it stands it may lead to IEDs being placed in less obvious locations hindering detection."

And the source of my information - referenced in the book? Ah! The MoD website. (I wonder how long that link will remain active - its only been up since 2005.)

Nor must I tell people that the Jackal (pictured) has armour "around the cab and the sides". This "may lead to increased targeting in that area." But, as someone said to me, these Taleban are really cunning - they've got this new equipment ... called "eyes".

Is it any wonder the MoD are losing the war?

COMMENT THREAD

MoD+Basra[i-MoD+Basra]
Another landmark in the British defeat in southern Iraq was reached today when Major General Andy Salmon, of the Royal Marines, formally handed command in Basra to his US Army counterpart Major General Michael Oates.

With that, the Royal Marine flag was lowered for the last time at Basra Air Station, when the flag of the US 10th Mountain Division was raised to replace the Marines’ colours.

The symbolism of this has been entirely lost on the commentators, but it was elements of the 10th Mountain Division which assisted the Iraqi Army in the recovery of al Amarah last June, in operation Promise of Peace after it had been abandoned by the British Army in August 2006, thus leaving the Mahdi Army free rein to turn the city into the bomb-making centre for the rest of the Shi'a insurgency.

Despite this senior British generals are celebrating the "enormous success" of UK troops in Iraq, having coined yet another term for "retreat". Such is the language of propaganda that the earlier retreats from al Amarah and then central Basra became "tactical moves" while the retreat from Basra Palace became a "repositioning". But the spin doctors have excelled themselves today, describing the current humiliating hand-over to the Americans, as a "Change in coalition command structure in southern Iraq".

If only Lt-Gen Percival had been so agile with terminology in February 1942, he would perhaps have gained his knighthood instead of ignominy, and gone on to greater things.

Certainly, the Orwellian decay of the language does not allow for the use of the words "surrender" or "defeat". We have achieved a glorious "change in coalition command structure" and now our troops can be "repositioned" elsewhere, where they can repeat the process all over again. Now that the word "defeat” has been abolished, there can be no stopping them.

COMMENT THREAD

packer01[i-packer01]One gets exceedingly weary of the hole-in-the-corner way the MoD is "playing" the war in Afghanistan. Its strategy is to keep us largely uninformed as to what is really going on, while devoting its resources to a steady trickle of propaganda which serves to obscure rather than reveal the truth.

It played exactly the same game in Iraq, feeding us with glowing "puffs" about the "derring do" of "Our Boys", and happy little "touchy-feely" pieces about how our caring-sharing troops were engaging with those nice Iraqis and how things were getting better all the time – when the whole campaign was going down the pan.

We saw the propaganda technique in full swing last week when, out of the blue, we get a graphic account of an operation in the Upper Sangin Valley "which has struck severely at the narcotics industry in Helmand".

"Waves of helicopter-borne troops caught the Taliban by surprise," we were told, "in a meticulously planned assault which helps finance the Taliban's insurgency." And then we got the political pay-off from defence secretary John Hutton, who happily twitters:

Our dedicated and professional forces have once again taken the fight to the enemy. Their bravery, coupled with the size and sophistication of our firepower, has cleared the enemy from large areas of Helmand bringing security and governance to more of the province. The seizure of £50 million worth of narcotics will starve the Taliban of crucial funding preventing the proliferation of drugs and terror on the UK's streets.

It is funny how military operations are always "meticulously planned", and no doubt this one was – like all the rest, although one suspects the MoD would not be publicising it otherwise. They leave those to their Boards of Inquiry and then keep schtum about the results.

Putting this operation in perspective, the local value of the Afghani heroin trade is in the order of £3 billion (as export income). By the time the drugs get on the streets at their destinations, they are worth ten times that – and sometimes more. Hutton's £50 million is in fact worth about £5 million as export value in the form of heroin. As crude opium in situ it is probably worth one tenth of that – about £500,000. That is not even chump change compared with the total value of production.

Even then, the figure is meaningless. The "industry" in Afghanistan is vastly over-producing. It is thus keeping back considerable stocks in reserve, to keep the price buoyant. It will simply replace this amount from stock and won't even miss it. That is one of the more sinister activities of the Taleban, they way they are manipulating the market. Thus, the loss of this small quantity of drugs will have no impact on the overall income and cause very little more than a minor, local inconvenience. It will certainly have no effect on the amount of heroin reaching the UK.

Without in any way downplaying what our troops achieved – they put their lives on the line for this operation - this is typical MoD spin. They talk up every "success" while never giving us the overall picture.

We saw them doing exactly the same in Iraq, talking up weapons cache seizures, which were minuscule compared to what was actually in circulation. On the other hand, they kept very quiet about major losses of equipment and wounded soldiers when, for instance, supply convoys got bounced - which was happening very frequently indeed.

The very great danger in hyping this up is that the MoD actually begins to believe its own propaganda, and starts to think it is achieving anything substantive. That again harps back to Iraq, when the Army mounted a huge programme of raids to capture weapons and bomb-making materials. When it paraded the seized material, one definitely got the sense that the MoD believed it was achieving something. But the raids made absolutely no difference to the rate of bombing and attacks.

Yet, when the US Army and Iraqis closed down the bomb-making factories in al Amarah and Maysan province, within a month, combat engineers doing mine clearance noted a sharp fall off in the number of bombs being laid. The MoD was deceiving itself that its activities were having any effect at all.

What we don't get is any sense of a balance sheet – what we are gaining in overall terms, and what it is costing us. For sure, we know that troops are killed – we know that because the MoD is obliged to tell us when a soldier dies, but it does not tell us of the injured.

What little information we get is statistically meaningless, because we can't relate to anything. The most detail we get is in "puffs" about heroic recoveries of British soldiers, who defy all the odds to overcome their injuries. This is in no way to denigrate these admirable people. It is to attack the MoD for the way it exploits their efforts as a tool of propaganda, giving a one-sided view without the bigger picture.

A little of that emerges in The Sunday Times today which publishes an article headed: "MoD hides rising injury toll of Taliban bombs". There, we are told that more than 100 British soldiers have suffered amputations and other debilitating injuries in the past year in Afghanistan, "according to previously suppressed Ministry of Defence (MoD) figures that reveal the true toll of the Taliban's roadside bombing campaign."

The number of troops losing limbs or eyes, suffering serious burns or permanent brain damage has increased dramatically since August 2007 when the Taliban intensified their efforts. During the past 18 months, 37 of the 71 British troops killed are known to have been the victims of roadside bombs or mines, but the number of troops disabled in the attacks has never been fully disclosed.

Figures now obtained by The Sunday Times show that 37 soldiers suffered "life-changing injuries" between April 2006, when they first deployed to southern Afghanistan, and the end of that year. There were 55 such injuries during the whole of 2007. Last year the figures more than doubled to 114 and there have been 12 cases this year.

Yet this is only one glimpse of the downside. We still don't get any details of how these troops were injured, under what circumstances, and whether – of crucial importance – they could be prevented.

One tantalising piece of information is that, while the MoD has bought better armoured vehicles in an attempt to counter the Taliban offensive, insurgents using such large amounts of explosives there is a limit on the protection afforded even by new Mastiff armoured vehicles. There have, we are told, been cases of soldiers in Mastiffs who were protected from a blast but who lost their legs below the knee as a result of the shock wave inside the vehicle.

We also learn that such is the scarcity of helicopters – which would provide a safer mode of transportation - that last week a British operation against the drug barons financing the Taliban had to use aircraft provided by the US marines. That, incidentally, is a detail curiously missing from the MoD "puff" on the operation.

Campaigners, says The Sunday Times claim the MoD is deliberately keeping the human cost of the war out of the public eye. All the MoD will admit is that 23 soldiers underwent amputations between December 2007 and November 2008, but said is was "unable to provide a breakdown of other serious injuries."

If that is what it is saying, that is a barefaced lie. The most comprehensive details of all injuries in theatre are kept, on a single computer database in Selly Oak, with complete details of all incidents. They are instantly accessible and can provide breakdowns of all the details needed.

Since the MoD is so sparse with its information, perforce, the only real way of measuring progress on the battlefield has been the death rate. This detail has traditionally been used by military historians and, of late, it has been the main metric (sometimes the only metric) on which the media rely. It there is a high number of deaths, the media get interested. If there is a period without casualties, the media goes to sleep.

The problem is that even this metric is now becoming heavily distorted. We saw recently a report in The Daily Telegraph on the extraordinary measures taken to airlift a dozen wounded servicemen out of Helmand province "in the largest and most complex medical evacuation since the conflict in Afghanistan began".

From that piece, we also learn that more than 20 troops a week are being evacuated by air from Camp Bastion and that the number of aeromedical evacuations has more than tripled since the first British forces entered Helmand in 2006 with 800 troops flown home in the past year.

Last year, we also saw a piece which reported that British battlefield casualties had been almost halved by radical new changes implemented by medics, bringing down the death rate on the front line in Afghanistan from almost a quarter dying from their wounds to one in eight.

The massive improvement in survival rates has been put down to "miracle bandages", a new tourniquet and the use of trauma consultants on board evacuation helicopters.

Significantly, the use of large Chinook and Merlin helicopters carrying an anaesthetist or emergency medical consultant plus four medics are the key factor. With most journeys in Helmand involving a two-hour round trip, the doctors can effectively set up a trauma station in the back of the helicopter keeping the patient alive until they reach the field hospital in Camp Bastion.

All this is being done for admirable reasons, and it is far too cynical even to suggest that the enormous effort made to prevent troops dying suits the MoD rather well. The fact is though, that with fewer troops being killed – when even quite recently they would have died – the war in Afghanistan is getting far less scrutiny than it might otherwise have done.

With 58 troops having died this year and last, and a ratio one death in eight applying when previously it would have been one in four, we might have seen 132 deaths but for the changes. Those extra 74 deaths would have brought the total from the current 126 to exactly 200.

These are, of course, rough calculations, but the point is made. With there having been 178 deaths in Iraq, a recorded death toll well in excess of that in Afghanistan would have drastically altered the media dynamics. There would have been far more reporting, much more comment, considerably more criticism and a great deal more political intervention.

What has escaped comment from those who have recently reported on the efforts made to keep injured troops alive is the apparently disproportionate effort being expended. From our extremely limited fleet of Merlins and Chinooks, no expense is spared when it comes to using them as flying trauma stations, but that leaves us even shorter of helicopters for operations, so we have to borrow from the Americans or send troops out in less safe forms of transportation.

Not for the first time do we observe that it would be gratifying if the MoD – as well as the media and politicians – devoted as much energy and resources to keeping troops alive and uninjured as they did to treating them and trying to keep them alive after they have been wounded.

That they could do more is indicated by a piece from Thomas Harding last week, in which he records an interview with Canada's defence minister who tells us that British forces in Afghanistan could "learn lessons" on how to properly equip troops on the front line.

This is an issue we have covered many times on this blog, noting how the Canadians are far more advanced in their force protection techniques, using equipment that we are only now thinking of buying, while still having considerable capability gaps.

With the death rate being contained by "artificial" means rather than by improved fighting equipment and tactics, the fear is that these words will fall on deaf ears. It has been difficult enough getting the MoD to focus on force protection and without constant pressure, there is great danger that we will see backsliding and a renewal of the complacency which has blighted the whole campaign.

As important, with the statistics being skewed – even if for the best of reasons – we are no longer getting any measure of what is going on, beyond the propaganda "puffs" from the MoD. Deprived of signals, we can only speculate, with suspicion that it is far worse than is painted and deteriorating rapidly.

Neither this government nor the MoD can be trusted to tell the truth, and nor can the media be relied upon to ferret it out. We can, under these circumstances, only fear the worst. We are now, in many senses, paying the wages of neglect.

I am cross-posting this on Defence of the Realm.

COMMENT THREAD

Bara+votes[i-Bara+votes]Having spent the last three months immersed in writing up an account of the Iraqi occupation in the British sector, from May 2003 to date, the "great work" is finished all bar the all-important processes of editing, cleaning up and revision. Writing 90,000 words, give or take, has been an interesting experience, and highly educative. If anything, I am appalled at my own ignorance when I embarked on the project.

The story, though, is not quite at an end. British troops cease operations in May and must be out of the country by the end of July, barring 400 or so who will continue training and mentoring duties.

Already, the British government and the military are re-writing history to make out that the occupation was a tremendous success, achieving everything they set out to achieve. Everything went to plan, especially if – as Montgomery was often accused of doing – you re-write that plan after then event and forget what you said at the time.

Aside from the posturing of the British, great events are taking place with the regional elections completed yesterday and the count underway. Little of what is at stake, however, emerges in the British media, and one must look elsewhere for a hint of what is important.

If you know what you are looking for, The Washington Post provides that hint. Buried in its syndicated report, you find a suggestion that the election was "in part" a referendum on two of Iraq's influential personalities – Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

While al-Maliki hopes to deepen his growing influence through election victories by his loyalists, we are told, al-Sadr is hoping to reverse his waning political clout by supporting independent candidates.

That indeed is the issue. More than anything, it was Sadr's Mahdi Army which cast is reign of terror over Basra and the south, latterly displacing the Fadhila and Badr militias, to become the major threat to peace and stability, not only in the south, but in the whole of Iraq. The hope is that Sadr is a busted flush, and there is every reason to think that this is the case.

In that context, you will find numerous references to last year's "Charge of the Knights" operation, masterminded by Maliki, when the grip of the Mahdi Army was broken in Basra. However, while Muqtada was faced down, he was not defeated. In 2004, in the first Mahdi Army uprisings, his attacks were seen off and his followers sustained heavy losses. They were to gather strength and return in greater force.

This time, however, it is different. Earlier, Sadr's armoury and weapons distribution centre in Maysan, with its hub in al Amarah, was theoretically under British control but, in fact, under the control of the Mahdi Army, left largely undisturbed. As long as this centre remained undisturbed, Muqtada had stocks of weapons, and a cadre of fighters on which he could rely.

What makes the current so different is that, now, al Amarah has been neutralised. And, while "Charge of the Nights" was well-reported, in which the media consistently called it wrong, the follow-up operation, barely reported, was far more significant, a comprehensive and humiliating defeat for Muqtada.

As far as we can ascertain, the operation actually started last May, with US Air Force F-16s and Navy F-18 Hornets and Super Hornet bombers performing "shows of force" and precision bombing through May and into June. At one stage, an RAF Tornado joined the fray. More airpower, it seemed, was committed to this stage of the operation than the British had enjoyed throughout their whole tenure in Maysan.

As this phase of the operation started, on or around 10 May, Iraqi Special Operations Forces detained three suspected "Special Groups criminals" in al-Amarah. On 5 June, the unit mounted another raid into the city and captured one more such "criminal". As guests of the Iraqi Army, one can only speculate on the hospitality they were afforded – and the intelligence they offered in exchange. Nine days after the second raid, Iraqi and US troops were pouring into the area, ringing the city. Operation Basha'er as-Salaam – "Promise of Peace" – had begun.

promise+peace[i-promise+peace]Backed by the Iraqi Army's 10th Division, special forces units, and elements of the US 10th Mountain and 1st Cavalry Divisions, amounting to some 22,000 troops in all, Maliki issued an ultimatum to the Mahdi Army. Repeating the successful strategy he had used in Basra, he gave them three days to lay down their arms – offering an amnesty to those who did. He also offered cash for any heavy weapons surrendered.

Maliki was, he said, giving the "outlaws and the members of the organised crime groups a last chance to review their stance." Iraqi and US soldiers then set up security checkpoints on the main roads, distributing leaflets urging people to stay indoors and remain calm.

To press home the point, US Navy Hornets made low passes over the city. Faced with such overwhelming force, Muqtada caved in, sending a delegation to the city to order his fighters to stand down. And it was a complete and utter capitulation. While Muqtada had made a fight of it in Basra, here he held his hands up and surrendered.

On 19 June, as the ultimatum expired, the troops moved in. Not a shot was fired. Militia fighters were seen throwing their weapons into the canals. One of the first targets for the troops was Mayor, who was arrested and detained, with about 16 other Sadr organisation officials.

Moving through the rest of the silent, fearful city, the Iraqi Army brought with them a secret weapon - over 10,000 halal ready-meals. Setting up distribution points in 12 neighbourhoods, they handed them out to all comers. By midday, the streets were thronging with life.

Following the troops were "community transportation improvement teams," ready to start a programme of city public works and highway sanitation. Before that, teams of national police, brought in with the troops, conducted house-to-house searches.

Far from meeting resistance, as had the British, they met with enthusiastic citizens telling them where to look. The results speak for themselves. Within days, the search teams had detained approximately 200 militia and collected more than 220 weapon caches, distributed in homes, businesses and public areas throughout the city.

The haul amounted to 2,262 mortar bombs, 1,034 mines, 971 artillery rounds, 749 rocket-propelled grenades, 598 rockets, 259 missile launchers, 176 IEDs, 259 grenades, 43 heavy machine-gun barrels, 141 EFPs and 22 missiles. After a month of occupation, the Iraqi Army had not seen a single gunfight, not one IED attack, nor received any indirect fire.

Operations continued in Maysan, occasionally meeting with sporadic resistance. It was quickly suppressed, and more caches were found. On 16 August, Iraqi and US troops discovered near al Amarah, 250 EFP plates, 125 107 mm rockets, two rocket launchers, 15 120 mm mortar bombs, one mortar tube and two sniper rifles.

By early October, Col Philip Battaglia, commander of the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division, was confident that the resistance had been broken. The weapons haul now exceeded 8,000, including about 600 EFPs.

Said Battaglia, "al-Amarah ... was an area where these devices were assembled and then from there shipped to other parts of the country, into Baghdad and other places." He added, "We believe - we know - that we have interrupted the flow of these explosives."

Gen Petraeus then announced that the flow of weapons was drying up throughout Iraq. "We think we are literally running out of safe havens and strongholds and starting to run out of these areas where there were these very significant caches," he said.

With that, the scourge of al Amarah was ending. Muqtada's power base had been broken and, since then, there has been a return to near-normality in Maysan province.

The elections held on Saturday were the first opportunity for Iraqi citizens to pronounce a verdict on the operations. From the look of it, Maliki's supporters seem to have made string gains in the south, especially in Basra and also in Muqtada's earlier stronghold, Najaf.

Even then, a later report in the Washington Post is reading it wrong. That puts the contest as between the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council and Maliki's Dawa Party and his allies, but the real battle is indeed between Muqtada and Maliki.

If the unofficial results are confirmed, then there is hope for the peoples of Iraq, and some optimism that this beleaguered country might at last see that "promise of peace". If it does, the turning point may have been Basra, but the enemy was defeated in al Amarah – without a shot being fired.

COMMENT THREAD

gaza+22[i-gaza+22]Yesterday did not go quite as planned, with several posts on the stocks but none written. Not least, the book is taking its toll, now with 62,000 words written, and the shape of the "plot" crafted by Booker in his column.

Predictably, the comments on the online version were relatively few in number, but better quality than expected. Usually, when anything on Iraq is written, it drags in all the nutters, afflicted with Bush derangement syndrome and those accusing Blair (and Bush) of conducting an illegal war. There would have been more comments, but for the moderators' censorship – hotly denied but true nonetheless – and habit of closing down comment early.

One interesting comment from an American accused us Brits of being "two-faced." We complain "when YOUR troops are just sitting there when they are getting hit with rockets & mortars; but then you protest in the streets when Israel takes the VERY SAME action YOU demand that YOUR troops should have taken to halt the rockets and mortars."

Actually, "we" don't, but I was not allowed to make that point by the censorious Telegraph. But, as we pointed out in an earlier post, there are parallels between the situation in al Amarah in the first half of 2006 and the present situation in Gaza. In the former, the British turned tail and ran, in the latter, of course, we see a robust response, reflecting a determination and commitment than no longer seems to exist in this country.

The parallel continues in a sense, where we see the whimpish response of our government manifest itself again, with first Miliband and now Gordon Brown calling for a cease fire.

The only good thing to come out of this horrible episode, therefore, is to see the Israelis – in contrast to their disarray in Lebanon in 2006 – reject the bleatings of the appeasers who seem to think that it is possible to negotiate with Hamas on the same basis that you would expect with a normal government.

That rejection also extends to the increasingly pathetic EU which is so embarrassing that it seems to be admitting its own failures even to itself. The ghastly Javier Solana has conceded that there had been a "failure of diplomacy" in response to the Gaza crisis so far.

Much the same has applied to the other tranzie deadweight, the UN, with even Hamas dismissing its attempts at mediation as a "farce", after the security council failed to agree a statement in response to the crisis.

By contrast, the US is taking the only credible line, calling for a ceasefire "as soon as possible" but linking that to an absolute guarantee that Hamas ends its rocket fire. And there, Hamas could bring this trauma to an end right now. All it has to do is to stop firing rockets, surrender its arsenal and give that guarantee.

However, there is one final parallel with al Amarah. Although the British response to what is known as "indirect fire" was ineffective, that did not mean that it did nothing. It launched many raids into al Amarah, killing and wounding several hundred (or even more), Mahdi fighters, damaging and destroying hundreds of houses and killing many civilians. It also called in air strikes, many times.

These things it did in the exercise of its right to self defence, as an occupying power, under the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949, and the much older rules in the Hague Regulations of 1907. None of the precious "international community" so much as batted an eye when the UK exercised this right – much less called for a "cease fire" while the Mahdi Army was still rocketing the British base. Yet it seems that the UK, with its fellow travellers, would deny Israel exactly the same right.

Perhaps our commentator was right: us Brits are two-faced.

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Hamas[i-Hamas]Reviewing the breast-beating in the "liberal" media over the Israeli strikes on Gaza, it occurs that the UK government – and military – should understand completely what the Israelis are trying to do.

In this, there is a singular parallel between the situation in which the British found themselves in Iraq in 2005-6, where their base near al Amarah called Camp Abu Naji was subject to incessant rocket and mortar attack.

Starved of resources, the British Army had little option but to endure - through no fault of its own - occasionally launching punitive raids into the city in the hope of taking out some of the insurgents and affording the camp slight relief from the daily bombardment.

This culminated in the heroic but disastrous raid on 12 June 2006, when a Company-strength overnight raid into the city was met with an estimated 200 Mahdi Army fighters. The ensuing battle (wholly unreported at the time) was reckoned to have seen the most vicious fighting since 2004, in which the Army – with the help of air cover and heroic flying by a USMC helicopter pilot – managed to extract without fatalities.

Brilliantly fought - reflecting the Army (and supporting arms) at its most professional - the raid was nevertheless a strategic failure. Within days, the rocketing and mortaring of the camp resumed and was to continue with increasing intensity until, in August, the British vacated Abu Naji, only to have it ransacked by a jubilant Mahdi Army.

If the British thought this would afford relief – they were wrong. With al Amarah virtually under Mahdi Army control, the city and surrounds became the armoury and workshop for the insurgency. Thus invigorated, the Mahdi Army turned its full attention to British bases in Basra. One by one, the Army was forced to evacuate, until it was hunkered down in its one remaining base in the former Basra International airport.

The lessons from this are simple – and hardly new.

First, if someone is attacking you with the intention of killing you, you must respond with deadly force, killing them before they have the opportunity to achieve their aim. You do not negotiate - you kill them.

Second, a half-hearted response is worse than useless. A failure to deal decisively with the enemy simply encourages them to redouble their efforts. Any response should be overwhelming (what the military call "overmatch") and wholly disproportionate. The objective, as much as anything, is to demonstrate your power and to demoralise the enemy, sending it a message that it cannot win.

Third, appeasement, or the "softly-softly" approach, is doomed to failure. In the macho culture of the Middle East, this is seen by the enemy as a sign of weakness, prolonging rather than ending the agony.

It instructive that, when the Iraqis and US forces finally decided to clear out al Amarah – which they did in June of this year - they sent in 22,000 troops, supported by massive air power. This compared with the British effort, which allocated a mere Battle Group of 1200 men, and minimal air cover.

The US and Iraqi forces gave plenty of warning and told the insurgents to surrender their arms or be killed. When the troops entered the city, not a shot was fired. Enough arms to supply a small army were surrendered.

Therein also lies a lesson for the "international community". As long as they give succour to the terrorists, giving them aid and interceding with "cease fires", thus saving them from ultimate destruction or surrender, they will perpetuate the agony.

There is only one solution to this continuing tragedy – overwhelming, deadly force, sending out an unmistakable, unequivocal signal: "You try, you die!" Only when Hamas get that message, loud and clear – and cannot turn to the "international community" to protect them from consequences of their own murderous behaviour – will the violence stop and the talking start.

That is – or should be – the new deal. Anything else, as the British found in al Amarah, leads you down the road to defeat, destruction and, in the final analysis, more death and misery.

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Mike+Jackson[i-Mike+Jackson]One has to suppress a wry smile and at least admire the speed with which General Sir Mike Jackson has got his knife in first, before the many knives are directed at his broad but inadequate back.

The man is writing in The Sunday Telegraph today about the impending departure of British forces from Iraq, telling us that the withdrawal "represents a most significant achievement after what will have been a very difficult and challenging six years."

He thus tells us that Britain’s Armed Forces "will leave Iraq with heads held high" and that they "should be proud of their efforts".

That is fair enough, applied on an individual and unit level, where the courage, tenacity, skill, dedication – and suffering – of our troops (and airmen and sailors) is to be applauded, unreservedly. They did what they could, and many did more than we had any right to expect of them.

However, we – and they – should not run away with the idea that the campaign was a success. At best, we could describe it as an "heroic failure". Our armed forces were under-resourced, undermanned and ill-equipped from the very start, given a job that they could not hope to achieve. And thus, predictably – but with no reflection on those at the cutting edge – they failed.

In the end, after abandoning the outer provinces, with their ignominious retreat from al Ahamrah, forced on them by the pitifully inadequate resources allocated to the Maysan Battle Groups – they were driven out of all but one of their bases in Basra, until they were hunkered down in the former Basra airport, out of the game.

It took Iraqi troops, with the support of the US – including its massive air power – to recover Basra from the Mahdi Army and it was not until June that they did likewise with al Amarah.

These points we have made before, but you will not hear Mike Jackson make them. To him, in his piece today, anything that went wrong was the fault of the Americans, or anyone else but Mike Jackson.

Initially, it was all the fault of the Iraqis, whose "expectations of immediate economic improvement were understandably but unrealistically high." Their frustration at not seeing this realised quickly turned to anger with the Coalition forces.

Then, this volatile situation was "much exacerbated by the security vacuum created by Washington's appalling decisions to disband the Iraqi security forces and to de-Baathify the public administration to a very low level; the latter marginalised the very people who were best placed to help."

These decisions, asserts Jackson, "may well have doubled the time it has taken to get to where we are now." Then there was the Iranian backing for Shi'a "militants", which was a further difficult complication. And there was also "the lack of a coherent reconstruction plan and the failure in Coalition capitals to understand fully the complexity of the situation."

All this may be true, and no one will disagree that the Americans made some appalling mistakes. But so did the British. Immediately after the invasion, they failed to recognise that a Shi'a insurgency was building up round them, initially attributing attacks to Saddam loyalists and the remnants of his forces. Instead of taking on the militias, they gave ground to them, made deals with them, and then eventually handed southern Iraq to them on a plate.

Much of that was entirely the responsibility of the politicians, and Tony Blair in particular, who lacked the courage, in the face of the growing unpopularity of the war, to commit the resources and the men to do the job properly. Instead, his "spin" machine went into high gear, painting a wholly false picture of a "success" that was belied by the fact that the security situation was getting worse, and worse and worse.

Writes Jackson, "the campaign became a long haul – we had to have the strategic endurance to see it through." But we didn’t. We did not have the "strategic endurance" nor the political endurance, nor the political will. So it was fudged.

But nowhere do I see any evidence at all that Mike Jackson, who was professional head of the Army until August 2006, had a grip on the campaign, knew what was needed or sought to ensure that the Army was properly equipped for the campaign. It was, after all, Jackson who authorised the sending of Snatch Land Rovers to Iraq and it was he who kept them there, long after it was abundantly clear that they could not do the job required of them.

Thus, while the Americans may have made all the mistakes in the book, they learned from their experiences, adapted and then prevailed. That the British Army came out of the campaign with much the same equipment with which they started, and recognisably similar tactics, says a great deal. Despite the courage and dedication at the cutting face, the high command failed to adapt, failed to meld the Army into an effective counter-insurgency force, and failed ultimately to provide the leadership that the Army needed.

Interestingly, Jackson observes that the period in Iraq has "been a long, hard and controversial campaign, but I believe it has largely succeeded." He is right in all respects, but the success is not his, or that of the British Army. Our forces rose to the challenge, writes the man, but the leadership – both military and political – did not.

And to the end, like his former political master, Jackson is "spinning". He writes of "the announcement that Britain is largely to close down its military role in Iraq by May 31, 2009," not acknowledging that the date is not one of our choice. It has been set not by Mr Brown, but the Iraqis. They have kicked us out.

Even then, that date might not be the final word. When Gordon Brown so confidently announced it last week, he forgot to tell the world that this was a provisional agreement, subject to ratification by the Iraqi parliament. Without its agreement, our mandate ceases at midnight on 31 December, after which we are required to leave.

But the Iraqi parliament has not agreed. Yesterday, it threw out the draft law which would have permitted the extension of our stay to 31 May – by a massive 80 votes to 68.

Another vote is due next week but there is a strong caucus in the parliament which want to see the back of the British. Not least is Nasser al-Issawi, an MP loyal to Muqtada Sadr. He has hailed the rejection of the draft as a "great national achievement", and said he hoped the foreign troops would be forced to leave when the UN mandate ends.

If the parliament finally rejects the law, it will be up to Nouri Maliki to save our blushes by exercising his executive powers and signing individual agreements directly with each of the foreign states with troops remaining, giving them – and us - a legal basis to remain. This would be a messy solution, but rather appropriate for a messy war.

Soon enough, much of that mess – or the reasons for it – will emerge. And General Mike Jackson will not come out so well from its evaluation. It was just as well he got in first. He needed to.

I am cross-posting this on Defence of the Realm.

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