TAKING Basra was unexpectedly easy for the British army during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The 7th Armoured Brigade spent a fortnight on the outskirts of Iraq’s second city before it entered, fearing street fighting and civilian casualties. Instead the fabled Desert Rats were greeted by an excited crowd, some handing flowers to infantrymen who were happy to put them in the barrel of their guns. It is hard to think of a starker contrast with the murderous hostility which the British military faces in the city today.
The RAF Lynx helicopter shot down last week by a shoulder-launched missile is a stark illustration of how bad the situation has become. When troops rushed to retrieve the bodies of their five comrades, they were showered with stones and abuse. This is now the norm. British troops who once kept the peace in Basra now seldom venture outside their garrisons. They use helicopters as air taxis; it is too dangerous for them to travel by road. This, not the events of April 2003, marks the fall of Basra.
In Prime Minister Tony Blair’s parallel universe, the loss of the Lynx and its crew was an “isolated incident” that has been “magnified” by the media (to use the words scripted for Des Browne, the new Defence Secretary). Indeed Mr Blair would have us believe that Basra is stable enough for troops to begin their withdrawal from southern Iraq. Last week, we were told the Iraqi security forces were now 250,000 strong, with 150,000 in the army. What coalition propagandists did not tell us – though everybody knows it to be so – that within these figures lie thousands of militiamen in uniform, waiting for the time when coalition troops leave and they can start the business of fighting each other in civil war.
Mr Blair’s failure in Basra is, in many ways, more reprehensible than the failure of American troops to pacify the Sunni triangle around Baghdad, where the task was to dispossess the Sunni elite who ruled the roost in Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist party and who therefore had every reason to detest the new occupiers. The four provinces under British control, however, were predominantly Shi’ite, had attempted an uprising against Saddam in 1990 and been brutally repressed ever since. They had ever reason to welcome British troops as liberators – and afford Britain goodwill post-entry.
Yet Prime Minister Blair, like President Bush, failed to plan for what followed the invasion. Officials in London had sent tents and food parcels to the troops, planning for a humanitarian disaster which never happened. Unemployment was rife, pay not forthcoming and local militias were soon filling a growing power vacuum. Iran, which has long held imperial designs on Basra as part of its dream of a grand Shi’a alliance, offered sky-high prices for copper, leading locals to tear up cables and pipes to sell them for scrap. Lack of electricity and clean water were the most vivid expressions of the breakdown in a city of 2m, sending a clear message that the British were not in control.
