The Guardian of London has unearthed yet more reports from UK government officials to Tony Blair's office "that the US was disastrously mishandling the occupation of Iraq" in May and June 2003. John Sawers, Blair's envoy in Baghdad at the time and now political director at the UK's Foreign Office, "described the US postwar administration, led by the retired general Jay Garner, as 'an unbelievable mess' and said 'Garner and his top team of 60-year-old retired generals' were 'well-meaning but out of their depth'."
That assessment is reinforced by Major General Albert Whitley, the most senior British officer with the US land forces. Gen Whitley, in another memo later that summer, expressed alarm that the US-British coalition was in danger of losing the peace. "We may have been seduced into something we might be inclined to regret. Is strategic failure a possibility? The answer has to be 'yes'," he concluded.
Sawers' first memo, "Iraq: What's Going Wrong," on May 11, 2003, said of the US administration: "No leadership, no strategy, no coordination, no structure and inaccessible to ordinary Iraqis." The Guardian highlights what it calls the "mistakes" of those initial days that "contained the seeds of the present insurgency and anarchy."
· A lack of interest by the US commander, General Tommy Franks, in the post-invasion phase.
· The presence in the capital of the US Third Infantry Division, which took a heavyhanded approach to security.
· Squandering the initial sympathy of Iraqis.
· Bechtel, the main US civilian contractor, moving too slowly to reconnect basic services, such as electricity and water.
· Failure to deal with health hazards, such as 40% of Baghdad's sewage pouring into the Tigris and rubbish piling up in the streets.
· Sacking of many of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party, even though many of them held relatively junior posts.
That story has been getting a lot of play in UK and Australian press, but not here. And then there's the UK soldier's point of view, reported by the conservative newspaper, The Telegraph of London. After a three-month stint in Iraq, Special Air Service counter-terrorist specialist Ben Griffin quit the Army rather than return to Iraq and fight alongside American forces. He told the Telegraph:
I saw a lot of things in Baghdad that were illegal or just wrong. I knew, so others must have known, that this was not the way to conduct operations if you wanted to win the hearts and minds of the local population. And if you don't win the hearts and minds of the people, you can't win the war.
If we were on a joint counter-terrorist operation, for example, we would radio back to our headquarters that we were not going to detain certain people because, as far as we were concerned, they were not a threat because they were old men or obviously farmers, but the Americans would say "no, bring them back."
The Americans had this catch-all approach to lifting suspects. The tactics were draconian and completely ineffective. The Americans were doing things like chucking farmers into Abu Ghraib [the notorious prison in Baghdad where US troops abused and tortured Iraqi detainees] or handing them over to the Iraqi authorities, knowing full well they were going to be tortured.
The Americans had a well-deserved reputation for being trigger happy. In the three months that I was in Iraq, the soldiers I served with never shot anybody. When you asked the Americans why they killed people, they would say "we were up against the tough foreign fighters." I didn't see any foreign fighters in the time I was over there.
I can remember coming in off one operation which took place outside Baghdad, where we had detained some civilians who were clearly not insurgents, they were innocent people. I couldn't understand why we had done this, so I said to my troop commander "would we have behaved in the same way in the Balkans or Northern Ireland?" He shrugged his shoulders and said "this is Iraq," and I thought "and that makes it all right?"
As far as I was concerned that meant that because these people were a different colour or a different religion, they didn't count as much. You can not invade a country pretending to promote democracy and behave like that.