Their only redemption is to withdraw in the new year

The coalition is merely generating violence in Iraq. British ministers must save the army's reputation and pull it out

By Simon Jenkins

10/19/05 "The Guardian" -- -- Beware good news from Iraq this week. Some such news there will be. The federal constitution seems likely to pass referendum muster. It is the one thing that may yet forestall the country's formal partition.

Between now and elections for a new government in December there should be a semblance of political activity. As democracy it is a pastiche. Its leaders are entombed in the mightiest fortress on Earth, the Americans' Green Zone in Baghdad, while voting is not political but religious and ethnic. But it will be enough for the occupiers to claim that things are "getting better", and therefore that they should stay.

Last week I returned to Iraq for the first time since the end of 2003. If the essence of "getting better" is security then things are incomparably worse. I could no longer walk the streets or visit friends. Anyone associating with foreigners risks execution. Teachers, doctors, lawyers, academics are fleeing abroad for fear of kidnap. The National Museum has closed. Visiting VIPs must go everywhere by helicopter. The Iraqi head of Baghdad's military academy must change into civilian clothes before leaving his base. After nearly three years of American rule, Baghdad is simply the most terrifying city in the world.
Not surprisingly the chief topic among the occupation forces is how to get out. I own a fine collection of exit strategies dating back to Vietnam and Lebanon. Iraq already offers such exhibits as the neocon vintage 2003: "Exit when Iraq is a stable, secure and democratic beacon of peace in the region." There are less exotic versions, such as Tony Blair's exit-when-asked-to-leave or John Reid's exit-when-the-job-is-done. The most recent army standard-issue strategy is "exit when an Iraqi division is capable of independent deployment". Ask when that might be and the answer is "a ball of string".

These strategies have lost all touch with reality. Is Blair really giving right of veto on a British departure to a group of pro-Iranian Shias? As for Reid's "going when the job is done", what job? Bringing democracy to Iraq? We claim to have done that already. Bringing peace and security to the country? You must be joking. Rebuilding the Iraqi army? Of 113 paid-up battalions, the Americans regard just one as reliable in a firefight, and that after two years of recruitment and training. The fact is you can train an army but not motivate it. That it must do for itself.

No Iraqi units other than peshmergas from Kurdistan could be deployed by the Baghdad government against Sunni or Shia insurgents. At the weekend the Americans used air power rather than local troops to kill over 70 "insurgents" in a Sunni village outside Ramadi in revenge for five American deaths. Such counterproductive slaughter is what makes coalition withdrawal vital if civil authority is ever to be restored in Iraq.

The British army in the south no longer tries to police the towns. This is left to unreliable police units heavily penetrated by local militias, hugely complicating anti-terrorist operations. Instead the emphasis is on training the Iraq army's 10th Division. Yet who is being trained and to what end is dubious. The balance of power in any Arab country between army, police and unofficial militias will always be unstable while foreign troops are present.

Already the constitution leaves it open to provincial governors to co-opt into their police and local gendarmerie whichever militia appears to be dominant locally, and pay them from federal oil money. This might embrace the pro-Iranian Badr brigades in the south, al-Sadr's Mahdi army nearer Baghdad and the Sunni warlords of the Euphrates valley. Such alliances are no bad thing, since only someone with a sense of discipline is likely to deliver civil law and order, which the coalition conspicuously cannot do. Such moves are being reported across all southern provinces, in Nasiriyah, Amara and even round Basra itself.

Iraq is a landscape of poverty atop a lake of wealth. It is dotted with military citadels whose maze of bunkers and anti-blast walls eerily mimic their medieval forebears. Within, all seems safe and English-speaking. Food is good and Jeeps park within white lines. Outside, so the occupiers believe, a human ammunition dump is ready to explode into civil war should the civilised west depart.

I believe this is a false, indeed a racist, analysis. All Iraq, probably the entire Middle East, is simply waiting for us to go. It is waiting to see what new balance of power emerges within Iraq. Only then can anyone assess Iranian influence over the Shias, the importance of Syria to the Sunnis, the vexed status of Kirkuk or the nature of Kurdish autonomy. The coalition can no longer influence this balance, only postpone its resolution. It merely sits, generating violence and killing people.

An exit strategy is the management of retreat. The cabinet's refusal to adopt one not only betrays its befuddled mission in Iraq but outrages the reputation of the British army. The invasion was merely illegal. The occupation has been the most bafflingly inept venture undertaken by western powers in modern history. I tremble to think what Tony Blair and George Bush would have done with the cold war.

The British cabinet now owes it to those it has sent to their deaths to remove the army from Iraq with expedition and dignity. Having just spent a week with that army I have no doubt of its morale and its loyalty. I also have no doubt of its ruthlessness in joint memoir operations. In the not too distant future, Blair, Straw, Reid and Hoon are going to know the full meaning of "shock and awe".

These men have left a British army stranded in an Arabian desert with no apparent exit and no control over its fate. Their only possible redemption is to withdraw that army (other than as advisers) when the next Baghdad government is installed in the new year. Iraq can then be left to the Iraqis. If the Americans want to stay, more fool them.

Before leaving Baghdad I saw on television a desperate earthquake rescuer in Pakistan pleading for just one thing, helicopters, to save thousands from death in the mountains. Two hours' hop to the west, I was gazing on inert helicopters as far as the eye could see. Not one was saving lives - only political skins.

simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk

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