Why the UK should stay in Iraq

William Shawcross:

The new comfort zone for many politicians and leader-writers appears to be the notion that if Britain withdraws its troops from Iraq and sends all the freed-up forces to Afghanistan, then all will be well. Siren voices are insisting that honour would be satisfied by such a move and we would still be pulling our weight in what Gordon Brown refuses to call ‘the war on terror’ or ‘the war against Islamist extremism’. Afghanistan, say those voices, is the crucial place to be engaging al-Qa’eda. Iraq is a sideshow.

This is no comfort zone at all. The war against Islamist extremism is indivisible. ‘The thought that Afghanistan is somehow a more righteous war is absurd,’ General Jack Keane told me this week. Keane is the soldier who helped devise present US policy in Iraq and has been critical of the British performance in southern Iraq.

Al-Qa’eda is an international criminal organisation that declared war on the West in the 1990s, and is determined to subjugate us. If we cut and run from one crucial battleground, it will be a betrayal of our allies in both America and Iraq and a victory for all Islamist extremism, Shia as well as Sunni. Moqtada al Sadr, the Shiite leader in southern Iraq, was crowing in the Independent only this week that his militia had driven the British out.

The choices are not easy. We are in the midst of a world-wide war and British forces are overstretched and underresourced, fighting as they are in both Basra and Afghanistan. With only 100,000 men and women our armed forces are fewer in number than at any time since the Victorian era. It’s a disgrace and it is the responsibility of both Conservative and Labour governments. The present crisis, however, is the result of the thoughtless cuts imposed over the past decade by the man who is now Prime Minister.

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Any kind of unilateral withdrawal from Iraq would be seen by our principal ally, the United States, as little short of betrayal. General Keane said: ‘It’s really frustrating that while the US has the momentum in the north the Brits have let the south come apart. It would be absolutely the wrong time to withdraw. We need the Brits as an anchor in the south. Otherwise we will need to pull forces from the main effort, in the central region of Iraq, which is exactly what our enemy would want.’

But apart from our allies — just think what our enemies would make of British withdrawal. Bin Laden famously talked of people preferring the strong horse to the weak one. Al-Qa’eda’s brutally sophisticated propaganda machine would celebrate
it across the internet as a famous victory for the Islamist strong horse. The pictures of our last helicopters flying out (no doubt under fire), and the occupation and destruction of the ‘Crusader’ bases, would be exploited as recruiting tools across the world. Theperception of our ‘defeat’ in Iraq would make any victory in Afghanistan all the harder to achieve.

It’s always wise to read what the enemy says. Weeks before the 2003 invasion, bin Laden said that it was part of a Western plot, a Crusader campaign to annihilate Islam and establish a ‘Greater Israel’. That is still the Islamist lie. He has since declared that Iraq is now in the frontline of their war against the West.

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There is much more. Shawcross is the author of The Killing Fields about the genocide in Cambodia. He makes an insightful case for continuing the operation in Iraq and he also points to a real problem in the UK military where like the Clinton administration, the politicians made to deep cuts to fund social programs and find themselves stretched to keep the forces they have in the field in sufficient strength.