Ministry of Defeat: The British War in Iraq 2003-2009 by Richard North
Continuum, £19.99
After writing four books with Christopher Booker of the Sunday Telegraph, Dr Richard North, the defence analyst behind the Defence of the Realm blog, has written a blow-by-blow account of Britain’s disastrous occupation of southern Iraq from the invasion in April 2003 to the withdrawal of combat troops earlier this year.
As “the central symbol of the British Army’s tragic and culpable ill-preparedness and lack of flexibility in dealing with the Iraq insurgency”, North returns again and again to the controversial role played by the Snatch Land Rover in what Booker, writing in the foreword, argues was “one of the most humiliating chapters in the history of the British Army”.
The problem is that, while North clearly has an in-depth knowledge of the many foibles of the Army, he has produced a fantastically dull chronological, and largely descriptive, narrative about an historical event that millions of people feel deeply passionate about. Although Booker boasts that
North draws on “a wealth of published and unpublished sources, including private contacts with members of the forces”
and “high level sources in the defence establishment”, the vast majority of citations are, in fact, newspaper reports.
Frustratingly, North displays a colonially-minded lack of interest in the opinions of those people being occupied. So there is no mention of the telling Ministry of Defence survey in October 2005 that found that 65 per cent of Iraqis in the British-controlled Maysan province thought attacks against UK forces were justified, or a BBC poll in December 2007 that found that 86 per cent of Basra residents felt British troops had had a negative effect on the city. This ideological blindspot leads to North making ludicrous statements about Tony Blair’s “enthusiasm for international law” (which will come as news to those of us who watched the ex-Prime Minister trample all over the UN Charter before the invasion) and assuming, in the face of all the historical precedents, that the United States and United Kingdom sincerely want a representative democracy in Iraq.
Ministry of Defeat is a perfect example of radical historian Mark Curtis’ thesis about how the ideological system promotes “the idea of Britain’s basic benevolence” with regards to foreign policy. Criticism of foreign policy is possible, explains Curtis, but is almost entirely confined to very narrowly defined boundaries of acceptable debate, always highlighting “exceptions to or mistakes in promoting the rule of basic benevolence”.
So rather than the pre-meditated, unprovoked, war of aggression the invasion and occupation actually was, in what could be termed the “fight the war better” school of criticism, North repeatedly refers to the “strategic errors” and “inadequate equipment” that forced the British Army to fight with one hand behind its back. In short, he is not opposed to the occupation of a sovereign nation on moral grounds, just critical of badly fought wars. More than anything, North is keen for the Army to learn from its mistakes in Iraq, so it can better project its military power in Afghanistan.
With all this in mind, the question must be asked: if the invasion was illegal (as explained by then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan) and the subsequent occupation has led to more than one million Iraqi dead and continues to be opposed by the majority of Iraqis, surely it is not just a lack of clear thinking, but a sign of complete moral bankruptcy, to make only these ineffectual tactical criticisms about such an unspeakable crime?
Ian Sinclair
