Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

GORDON BROWN is quietly closing the book on Tony Blair’s catastrophic foreign policy adventure in Iraq. A timetable of sorts has now been set for British troops formally to relinquish responsibility for security in Basra, effectively their last role in the country.

That a way out has been found effectively and politically for the troops eventually to withdraw does not mean that democracy has been brought to Iraq – the avowed reason for the invasion – or that the killing has stopped. Sectarian killings continue even as some of the refugees return home to an uncertain fate.

The Prime Minister’s photo-stop visit last weekend served more as a reminder of the failures of the disastrous military intervention than as symbol of any great advance in the security of the region or the so-called war on terror.

With Iraq’s oil now in the hands of United States interests through an Anglo-American legal stitch-up, it is on that level only that it can be said that mission has been accomplished. British families are right to ask what their sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, died for.

The same question applies to Mr Brown’s follow-on photo-stop in Afghanistan. While soldiers die and vast sums are poured into propping up a pro-Western regime in Kabul, and many of the troops who will be pulled out of Iraq head for Helmand province, the question must be asked: what is the objective?

In Helmand’s Camp Bastion, Mr Brown declared that the defeat of the Taliban was vital to “defeating terrorism all around the world”. Do the troops really believe that? Defeating the Taliban was to have been achieved, according to then Defence Secretary John Reid, without a shot being fired. Now the operation – to no definable end – is described by British diplomats as a “30-year haul”.

It is no wonder that some in the military are quietly voicing worries that the Government is breaking the unwritten covenant with British troops – that they will not be sent – under equipped – into an unjust war. They have been. The cross-party consensus – “We can’t just stand by and do nothing”, says David Cameron – on Afghanistan reflects a post-imperial malaise from which politicians of all parties suffer, Labour more disgracefully than others. Mixed with American aspirations of global imperialism and the containment of Russia, it becomes a suicidal dangerous folly.

The battle to win hearts and minds, highlighted by Mr Brown, would be better conducted from a position of moral strength which requires the removal of troops which are seen as an occupying force in the minds that are supposed to be won. And what of the hearts and minds of the British people? Are they won over to this futile waste of lives and money?

The answer is likely to be that the general public, rightly, do not fathom what their troops are dying for. It is time for a wider inquest into the purpose of this operation and what we are doing there.

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ONE of the characteristics of both the Iraq and Afghan conflicts is that the cash is readily available. No restraints on public sector pay here. So when Children and Schools Secretary Ed Balls unveils his 13-year education plan, the inevitable question is: where is the money coming from?
Making children happier and better educated by 2020 is a laudable aim, except that it won’t apply to today’s pupils, or those setting out in early life when “new” Labour came to power more than ten years ago.

That happens to be the same year the Government has set for the abolition of child poverty. To reach the halfway goal by 2010, £4.5 billion will have to be found in the budgets to be set by Alistair Darling next year and the year after. That is a little under the cost of the Iraq war. The full cost up to 2020 is estimated at £28 billion, the equivalent of the amount the Treasury has bought the taxpayer into Northern Rock.

The Government could raise taxes on the 1.5 per cent of the population earning more than £100,000. Or it could scrap Trident and save £78 billion. Or it could tell us – and the public sector workers who already have an inkling – where else the money is going to come from.