Sir John Sawers’s appearance before the Iraq inquiry confimed what most British soldiers in Iraq already knew – that the Americans are no good at winning hearts and minds.
And so it came to pass that, for the first time ever, the boss of MI6 gave evidence to a public inquirty, not by video link, not behind a curtain – but out front.
Smooth, silky and at first it semed, very much fron the “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing” school of witness evidence.
I suppose he had to turn up in person. After all it is the same Sawers whose wife inadvertently outed him on her Facebook site some months back – holiday destination, family snaps, ill-advised swimming trunks, address of the London flat. There it all was online for anybody who cared.
Yes, yet more evidence that Spooks really is far, far, far wide of the mark.
So there he was. Helpfully guiding this gentleman’s club of an inquiry through anything they wanted to know about his Iraq experience, both as Blair’s private secretary in 2001 before the invasion, and then as Britain’s most senior man on the ground as the occupation went down the pan.
As time went on he began to warm up. Like al the generals yesterday, he painted a picture of complete lack of preparation for post-invasion Iraq.
Shocked he was to find himself sleeping in a dormitory, with intermittent leccy and no doors on the bathrooms. If the Americans couldn’t get their own act together living like this in Baghdad, how could they sort out the country?
It got better. In the end this smoothest of the smooth suddenly blurted out what countless British politicians and almost every single British soldier I ever met in Iraq said in private but never in public – that the Americans are no good at even trying to win hearts and minds.
He put it this way. Up in Baghdad the US army had the wrong “posture” and had failed to adjust from war fighting to rebuilding a country. It was, as he colourfully put it, all wrap-around sunglasses and Darth Vadar, what with their tanks and flak vests and all of it.
Not the right way to go about building any kind of bridges with the Iraqis. Though I had to smile when he said he had suggested to the US coalition leader Paul Bremer that putting a lot of British Paras into Baghdad might be the way of cracking the hearts and minds thing.
History would no doubt show our Paras have not much more of a track record than their Marines – Darth Vadar or not – when it comes to bridge-building in countries where you have blown up all the main bridges.
Chilcot purrs into its rather hushpuppy mode once again next Monday.