This is the way the Brit mission ends.
No bang; just the whimper of a procedural delay in the Iraqi parliament. After six years, the number of British troops in Iraq has gone from 46,000 to zero. (Well zero-ish, as there are some still based in Baghdad.)
A photograph in The Times said it all.
Illustrating a story headlined “Final British mission in Iraq in disarray without training pact,” the picture has a sort of ‘end of empire’ mood to it; listless Royal Marine band members sit around in the desert heat, waiting to play the Brits out of Iraq.
That was nearly two months ago. Now, the 100-150 British troops who’d stayed on in Basra after the big withdrawal have had to beat a hasty – and rather ignominious – retreat to Kuwait because the Iraqi parliament’s failed to sign off on a deal that would have allowed them to stay. They were Royal Navy training personnel.
The Ministry of Defence has published a “blog” today refuting a suggestion in today’s Times. “This move is not final,” the MoD says.
Jawwad Syed at the British Embassy in Baghdad dismissed criticisms that diplomats are to blame. “It’s not as simple as it might seem,” he told me. He explained that the British and Iraqi governments had actually signed an accord on 6th June, paving the way for the Navy to train Iraqi forces to protect oil installations in the Gulf.
It needed approval by parliament, but a backlog of unapproved legislation’s built up because there hasn’t been a quorum of Iraqi MPs to vote it all through. Jawwad Syed blamed MPs, taking long summer holidays; he blamed the Kurdish election; he blamed the 28 Sadrist MPs’ for walking out; he insisted Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki wasn’t punishing the Brits for their past performance.
Moves are afoot, Jawwad said, to find an interim solution. But if that doesn’t happen, Ramadan should ensure the Royal Navy trainers will be living it up in next-door Kuwait until the end of September.
Tempting though it is to cast this dismal footnote to the Great British Adventure in Iraq as symbolic of a mismanaged campaign, the truth is, the Iraqi parliament has shot itself in the foot.
Aside from one well-publicised misadventure, when British naval personnel were captured by Iranian revolutionary guards, the Royal Navy’s contribution to the British intervention in Iraq went pretty much according to plan.
Their final contribution was to train Iraqis to guard the mainstay of their economy, the world’s second-largest proven oil reserves, the exploitation of which will provide the Iraqi economy with hundreds of billions of dollars in the decades to come.
The RUSI academic Michael Codner, an ex–Naval officer himself, told me their role was to provide naval training in maritime patrolling to prevent illegal landings on platforms and deploying elite amphibious units to guard and evict. They’ll have been teaching them the Law of the Sea, he says, “and in those sensitive waters, focusing on accurate positioning and recording that position so that there’s no question of compliance.”
They’ve obviously learned a bit from that last little run-in with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in the Shatt.
“This is daft,” says Codner. “This was discrete, non-combat technical training, with no political baggage at all.”
Unfortunately, in the realm of public perception, this inglorious (temporary) retreat does look like Britain’s hapless 100-odd Royal Naval trainers have been left to lug back to Kuwait six years’ worth of political baggage.