Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40
- 59)
TUESDAY 26 JUNE 2007
DR ALI
ANSARI, DR
TOBY DODGE,
DR ERIC
HERRING, DR
GLEN RANGWALA
AND PROFESSOR
SAMI ZUBAIDA
Q40 Chairman: Specifically, are they
exporting IEDs, or exporting the expertise?
Dr Herring: The information which
has been made available in the public domain by the United States
on this is inconclusive at best.
Q41 Chairman: You cannot make it
conclusive in front of us?
Dr Herring: There has been nothing
that I have seen, in terms of all the claims about serial numbers
and manufacture, and so on, nothing enough for me to say, yes,
I have seen that. Also, the fundamental thing is, if you are worried
about weapons coming over the border, they are coming in via the
United States. There is no shortage of weapons in Iraq, they do
not particularly need them from Iran, and that is a critical factor;
so they are important politically but trivial militarily.
Q42 Chairman: Are relations improving
between local government in Basra Province and the United Kingdom
Armed Forces?
Dr Dodge: Do you mean specifically
Governor al-Waili?
Q43 Chairman: Let us start with him,
yes.
Dr Dodge: Certainly he is a frequent
visitor to the Airport and he has long and detailed discussions
with British diplomatic and military representation there. I would
go as far as to say that I would not think the British support
him, and I would hope they would not, because one would have deep
misgivings about his style and approach to government. They have
gone up and down, certainly during Operation Sinbad, and then
the targeting, the brief, more forward-leaning forage of the British
military into Basra, relations went down, depending if the British
tripped across militias around Fadullah, the party which supports
the Government. At the moment, the Governor's own political position
is very weak, so I suspect he is looking to the British for some
kind of sustenance, and not receiving it, as far as I know.
Q44 Chairman: We have heard already
all you have said about the general position of the Coalition
Forces, but how are UK Forces in the south-east regarded and,
subject to what you have said, are they a contribution to stability
or are they destabilising?
Dr Rangwala: I spent some time
with Basrawi academics in Jordan last week, and their fundamental
position seemed to be that British Forces were actually irrelevant
to much of what goes on within Basra, they rarely saw them, they
rarely engaged with any British institutions, and in that respect
they have marginalised themselves from the politics and society
of Basra. They have not taken on the sort of role which is either
stabilising or destabilising, in that sense, within the city.
Q45 Willie Rennie: Is that a good
thing or a bad thing, do you think?
Dr Rangwala: It is an irrelevant
thing; not a good thing or a bad thing, I suppose.
Q46 Mr Holloway: What do people think
the British are for then, in southern Iraq?
Dr Dodge: I think two things.
I would not disagree with Glen that they are just about to give
up their base in town, they are hunkered down at the Airport,
they are getting mortared at the Airport, more I suspect to put
pressure on London than anything else; that is all true. However,
I suspect, in the highly unstable and extremely violent arena
that Basra in politics is, a complete withdrawal of the British
may trigger, may destabilise and increase the violence there.
I do not know if that is true or not but that would be something
to put on the table; their presence limited but there is some
ill-fitting brake on the violence.
Q47 Mr Holloway: Can I ask the Professor,
so they are not there for anything, they are there just in case?
Professor Zubaida: I take the
view, as I said earlier about the Coalition Forces in general,
that Toby may be right that, in fact, they are a brake on much
wider violence, but the question is how long can they stay and
be a brake and, if they do not leave now, at any time in the future
when they leave will the situation be any better, is the question.
Of course, it depends what can be done in the meantime, and I
am not sure what can be done in the meantime.
Q48 Mr Holloway: I do not know if
this is a fair characterisation of what you seem to be saying,
Professor, but are you suggesting really that it is time now for
us to get out and let Iraq get on with its civil war? If that
is the case, do other people agree?
Professor Zubaida: I would really
hesitate to suggest anything, certainly anything—it is such
a desperate situation—which might increase the violence
would be irresponsible to advocate. At the same time, this is
a genuine question that I am posing, if they were to stay there
and leave in two years' time, what is going to happen in these
two years which is going to lead to a different outcome? This
is really a question that I cannot answer.
Dr Rangwala: My sense in Basra
is that the Fadilah Party runs the oil protection force, the Supreme
Council run the Intelligence Services, the Sadr Party run much
of the Police Force in Basra, and in that sense, at least, the
British presence does not have a significant impact upon those
different relations between those different parties, each running
different sectors of the Basra Armed Forces.
Q49 Mr Holloway: Should we leave
and let them get on with the civil war?
Dr Rangwala: I do not think there
is a civil war and I do not think there is in Basra specifically,
and I do not think that there is an impact upon the low-level
violence which continues to occur between different armed groups
within Basra itself.
Dr Dodge: I think it is simply,
periodically, outright conflict breaks out and violence flows.
I think to qualify that as low level is simply not the case. People
are dying in Basra. Basra is a lawless place where the politics
of the gun dominate; that is not low-level violence, that is anarchy,
and it could get worse or it could stay at a steady state.
Q50 Mr Hamilton: Surely, Chairman,
the point that Dr Rangwala is making is that the Brits are not
involved in all that; they have stepped back out of that, and
therefore why should they be there? It seems to me there is a
difference of opinion in relation to how best we deal with a diverse
Iraq. What is happening in the north is not the same as what is
happening in the south and the reactions are different. The real
question, because there is a difference and I do not want to go
away from here with a difference of opinion, not being fair myself,
effectively, you are saying, as I understand it, the Brits could
walk out tomorrow and it would not make much difference at all
in the south, and the real question is why are we there then?
Dr Herring: There are a couple
of things in that. It varies from place to place and if you take
Maysan Province, in which the British Forces have been fighting
recently, and so have the American Forces, the irony is that the
British military's own opinion-polling shows that the vast majority
of the population support attacks on British Forces, that is the
British military's own internal polling; whereas only a minority
in Basra support attacks on British Forces. Again, you have to
look at what they are doing. What people locally would like is
British Forces to help, occasionally they do take on militiamen,
they do actually free people who have been tortured, and so on,
and that has got to be a good thing, but it is not going to fundamentally
reshape the politics of that area and sometimes it is just going
to escalate, especially whenever you are involved with the American
anti-Sadr agenda, which is just not going to work there. You cannot
defeat any of these people this way, even if you do help things
occasionally, and, Toby is right, you will simply get major outbreaks
of fighting as they try to rebalance against themselves; but that
is happening anyway again.
Q51 Mr Hamilton: I am waiting to
hear what Dr Dodge will say, because your view seems to be they
are better there in case a major problem comes and they are already
there. That is not the same thing as your two colleagues; your
two colleagues basically are telling us "Let's go home because
we're doing nothing there anyway"?
Dr Dodge: No. There is a difference
of interpretation about what the future holds. I do not think
we are disagreeing particularly on the hell that Iraq is in, and
I have not got a solution. I think the solution that they will
be forced to come to an accommodation when the Coalition Forces
pull out is fundamentally mistaken, but that is a little bit of
a disagreement between us. What I would say is, we are in the
midst of a civil war, when the US and the UK pull out, and ironically
I think they will pull out, I just do not think they should, the
chances of a re-intervention are next to nothing. It is a very
low justification for Coalition troops continuing to be there;
once they have gone there is no solution. While they are there,
there may be the possibility of a solution; and, just to add,
if there is a multilateral solution with the UN it certainly will
not come about once the US has gone home.
Dr Herring: This is a critical
point, because really I think we are getting to the nub of the
whole thing, in relation to the UK presence there. The first thing
is, British Forces are dying, about one a week, on average, and
really we have to have a better reason for that than, vaguely,
"We might sometimes help," and I would argue that sometimes
we do. Glen and I have never said we are sure that these people
will be forced to an accommodation upon its departure, especially
not in the south; they have already, mostly, got their own accommodations
and then they decide not to have them and they fight. Sometimes
Britain, and you are right, happens to just stumble across one
particular militia group and the Governor happens to be happy.
That is just no way to continue to have British Forces killed.
Whether or not you have a re-intervention, that is not a reason
to stay in a bad situation, just because you will not go back
there. This is not something that we are capable of solving. British
Forces cannot resolve it, which is why lives are being lost, pretty
needlessly, even if occasionally they help on something; and things
may get worse in the short term, but that is not a reason. They
are going to go anyway so there are just going to be more people
dying; more British Forces die, then they go. That is an even
worse outcome.
Q52 Chairman: You are not saying
that things would get better if we left; you are saying that things
have no chance of getting better while we are there, is that right?
Dr Herring: It may be that, incidentally,
things happen to turn out to get better, but we will not be causing
that, we will not fundamentally be causing that; that is just
beyond British control. We are not involved to a degree that would
possibly deliver that kind of control.
Q53 Mr Holloway: What is the use
of staying then, if there is no plan and we do not really understand
why we are there any more?
Dr Dodge: There is a plan. It
is being executed by General David Petraeus.
Q54 Mr Holloway: Yes, but the British?
Dr Dodge: I assume, I would not
want to speak for our new Prime Minister but there are two things,
that there is a great deal of resentment in Washington and in
the American Embassy in Baghdad at the draw-down discussion, and
I think that was handled very badly, so if there was any justification
for joining this Coalition to invade Iraq it was Anglo-American
relations, the decision to pull out from Anglo-American relations,
undoubtedly. Secondly, the reason we are staying, just to repeat
it, I think that the British are acting as some form of brake
on increased violence in the south.
Q55 Mr Holloway: Do the others agree
with that?
Dr Herring: Fundamentally, no;
only at the margin, only at the margin. One of the reasons for
thinking that is, in terms of the pattern of the violence, there
were a number of waves of violence that struck through, the anti-Ba`thist,
the anti-Christian, the religious moralist violence, all of which
has mostly swept through the Province. Then there is the intra-faction
fighting, the mafia fighting, and this keeps sweeping through,
and we happen to get caught up in it. If you remember the fiasco
in 2004 when the first real military challenge, of course, to
the British Forces resulted in the Government headquarters being
overrun, the Americans having to come to the rescue; in terms
of any real fighting, they were simply incapable. I think my assessment
would be it is at the margin and sometimes it is making it worse;
so, therefore, do not be there.
Q56 Chairman: What about the important
role of training the Armed Forces there?
Dr Rangwala: Could I make just
a prior point, because I had a point which followed on from that.
There already has been the release of security responsibilities
from Muthanna, Maysan and Dhi Qar Provinces by the British, Provinces
which the British had a security role in, quite extensively, before
2006. There has been no explosion of violence in those territories.
Dr Dodge: There was in Amara.
There was an out-and-out fight between Badr and Sadr in Amara
after the British left.
Dr Rangwala: No; that was less
than actually were killed in 2004 while the British were still
there, in scale. There has been a continuing threat of disputes
but there has been no marked increase in the violence in any of
those governorates since the British left.
Q57 Mr Hamilton: Dr Dodge, you seemed
to indicate that we will damage Anglo-American relationships if
we pull out; but that completely ignores the fact that Democrats,
who have taken a different position from the Government, argued
very strongly on a timetable to leave. How do you come to the
conclusion that it will damage Anglo-American relationships if
the Democrats win the next election?
Dr Dodge: On two bases. One, the
British presence sits across American main supply lines from Kuwait
straight up; if the British draw down the Americans will have
to send troops down to take their places, which, until a Democrat
President, if and until a Democratic President takes office, will
damage north-south relations. Secondly, and this is my own interpretation,
once the next US President takes office, elected on an undoubtedly
Iraqi-sceptic platform, they will look at how they will have to
pull out. If you look closely at the fine print and the planning
for drawing down, are we talking about a complete cut and run,
are we talking about scaling back to the Green Zone or a removal
to the fringes; and all of that process will depend on supply
lines coming up from Kuwait. It is not black and white, cut and
run, with the Democrats. My own interpretation is that it will
take most of that first term for a US President to try to work
out what they do between a corporate swing and a collapsed state
and a civil war in Iraq and an increasingly and totally unpopular
occupation in America. I think, as that process unfolds, if we
are busy packing up and going home, we are going to engender a
deal of resentment at the highest levels of the American Government,
even as they are themselves struggling to scale down.
Q58 Chairman: Training: is not the
role of the British Army in the Basra area absolutely essential
to the training of the Armed Forces there?
Dr Herring: I think the fundamental
answer to that has to be no, because training is not the issue,
loyalty is the issue. All the forces, all divided by the sectarian
political parties, the notion that you can professionalise them
and they will stop doing this, because suddenly they realise that
professional soldiers do not do these naughty things, is not a
description of what is happening at pretty much any level in Iraq.
The issue is not training. The ones that were given the most training
and were deployed elsewhere in Iraq again are fundamentally useless
forces, even the ones that are meant to be the best, that have
been deployed in the recent surge offensive, and the Americans
are saying, "Well, it turns out they've got no bullets, they're
short of uniforms, they're short of radios, they're short of trucks,
and actually they tend to be kept that way because we are worried
about what they will do." The fundamental issue is loyalty,
they are riddled with, as we call them, embedded insurgents; we
are not going to train that out of them. It is about politics,
it is not about training.
Dr Dodge: You would have to make
a distinction between the Army and the Police Force, and I think,
if you had a representative of the British military here, they
would say that they have had quite a deal of success in training
the Army, and probably they would not say it but I would be happy
to say it, and the training of the Police has been an abject failure.
The Police are responsible for a great deal of kidnapping in Baghdad
and have been thoroughly penetrated by the militias in the south.
I think it is the Tenth Battalion in the south. The British Army
said that they sent forces up to Bagdad and have been seen to
be comparatively effective. I think, although undoubtedly there
are problems in the Army, they are much, much less, and if you
look at opinion poll data that we have both been siting, the Army
consistently gets a much higher recognition of trust than the
Police Force, which, again, not detracting from the problems inside
the Army, indicates the Army has more professionalism, they were
sent against the Mahdi Army in Diwaniyah, to some degree of success
as well. I think, although the Army has problems, it is more coherent,
a more nationalist force than the Police themselves.
Professor Zubaida: I have no special
knowledge on military matters but it seems to me that, while Toby
is correct on the difference between the Army and the Police,
whenever your Army has been entrusted with tasks without American
support it has done pretty badly, including in Diyala right now.
I wonder to what extent this is a question of lack of training,
a lack of resources or insufficient numbers, or perhaps weak motivation.
Q59 Linda Gilroy: Or even expectations
being too high, that you can actually train people pretty much
from scratch within a year; is that really realistic? Are you
saying the military have had some success, that you can expect
within a year for us just to draw back completely?
Dr Rangwala: Iraq has had a trained
Army, of course, for all of its modern history, so there are many
trained Iraqis. The question I do not think does come down to
training, in that respect, as my colleagues have said.
|
