Feature Article

Hard choices in the Iraqi endgame

In the week when Iraqis voted to back the new constitution and the death toll of British servicemen in the country pushes 100, a war correspondent calls for the allies to concentrate on what is achievable there ? even if this involves difficult decisions

THEY BROUGHT Sergeant Chris Hickey?s body home for burial this week. For once the plaudits from friends and comrades about his energy and joie de vivre were no military obituarist?s clich?s. I met him briefly on my last trip to southern Iraq. His cheerful, upbeat personality could be summed up in a word: ?outstanding?. He is the 97th British serviceman to die in Iraq since March 2003, 64 from hostile fire.

The circumstances of his death were explained succinctly by my correspondent from his unit. ?Sgt Hickey, an exceptionally popular NCO, was commanding his last patrol in Basra before flying home. He had dismounted to check a road junction for possible IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) ? a drill we all have done countless times ? and yet as he walked a few feet in front of his vehicle, he cut an infra-red beam which activated the roadside device.

?He probably never knew what hit him, but his four-man team in the vehicle not only saw it but also sustained minor injuries. Had he not carried out the correct procedures, the vehicle might well have taken the blast and more would have probably been killed. His death barely made the news; that is hard.?

All of this should raise some serious questions back home. But if they are being raised at all, it is in whispers in some very quiet corridors. The process of bringing constitutional rule to post-Saddam Iraq is becoming an increasingly tortured parturition, with a high risk of it being stillborn. Although Iraqi voters adopted the country?s new constitution, it is unlikely that elections planned for December can deliver a government of any credibility, let alone real executive authority. Meanwhile the violence in the country shows no sign of abating.

Back in those quiet Whitehall corridors of power, and indeed in their equivalent in Washington, the strategists have jettisoned first plan A, then plan B and are on to plan C. First up, the original plan A was a proposal to bring fully fledged Jeffersonian democracy to Iraq as outlined by the Bush proconsuls Bremer and Negroponte.

Later, Plan B was to a get a tough Baathist like Iyad Allawi back into the saddle, who would then demand summary withdrawal by the Americans and their British allies. This was described as the ?Saddam lite? solution. Now that too is off the agenda, and American and British troops are being told to remain in Iraq at their present strength for at least another year, possibly two. Once the mantra was ?staying until the job is done? but this is heard far less frequently today. The temptation among strategists now is to assume that an alternative approach will emerge. There is something Micawberish about it all. This ?no solution? approach is no solution for British and American, or even UN, policy in Iraq.

Time is against the coalition, as much as it is on the side of the men of violence, of whatever sect, race, nation, tribe or party, inside Iraq. Sooner or later the supply of troops will run out, both from the US and the UK. Then, public frustration in those two countries could become real electoral anger.

British military analysis, some of which was leaked to last Sunday?s papers, suggests that the level of violence is likely to escalate, with the insurgents expected to focus their attacks increasingly on the troops of the coalition, the Americans and British and their remaining allies.

The best the electoral process can be hoped to deliver is another weak government, which, while it may be in office within the Green Zone of Baghdad, will hardly be in power along the Tigris.

Throw into this confusing brew the spectacle of the former dictator Saddam Hussein on trial charged with crimes against humanity perpetrated against his own people. While the charges are grave, and his record terrible, even this has not started well. The constitution and the competence of the court itself have been called into question, and not without justification. Part of the process is based on the old code of Baathist Iraq, which borrows heavily from French jurisprudence and juridical practice. The Kurdish presiding judge had to be trained in the United States.

The mood of many Iraqis, particularly the relatives and friends of Saddam?s innumerable victims, is dark. The architects of the process against Saddam were desperate to avoid what they see as the mistakes of the International War Crime Tribunal hearings against Slobodan Milosevic, which they believe was successfully turned into a political platform from which Milosevic rants at his enemies. Instead, the same architects have made a huge catalogue of mistakes on their own. As presently constituted, the court trying Saddam looks like a hybrid, lacking authenticity in the culture of either Iraqi or international law, and credibility in the public media. In part much is due to American neuralgia about instruments of international law, and the International Criminal Court altogether.

Many fear that Saddam will be convicted in short order on a small selection of specimen charges, such as the revenge execution of 143 people from Dujail after the failed assassination attempt there in 1982, and taken away and hanged. While this might be perceived as judicial revenge in the old Baathist tradition, it would deny them and the Iraqi people the setting down of Saddam?s crimes and misdemeanours for the collective memory, an important aspect of any such trial.

Then there is the judicial tangle on the other side of the world in Washington, involving two hard men of the Bush regime, his principal ?brain?, Karl Rove, and ?Scooter? Libby, right arm and brain to Vice-President Cheney.

Their fates have hung in the balance while Special Prosecutor Fitzgerald hesitates over sending them for trial for perjury for leaking the name of Valerie Plame, a CIA covert operations director. Ms Plame is also Mrs Joseph Wilson, wife of the man sent by the Bush men to dig the dirt on Saddam?s purchases of uranium yellow cake from Niger for his nuclear weapons programme. Unfortunately Ambassador Wilson wouldn?t play ball, and said there was nothing in the Niger angle.

For all their spinning and innuendo, Rove and Libby have failed to spell out the case for the increasingly costly American involvement in Iraq, and for going there in the first place. In relative terms the American deployment is costing more annually than the commitment of US forces to Vietnam at their height. It is deplored not only by Bush?s opponents, but by supporters as well.

All this is not lost to the middling and lesser sort in the ranks of New Labour. ?They realise that they face a real catastrophe and their Government could fall,? a Whitehall mandarin suggested to me this week. In such circumstances, the ?no solution? solution appears attractive to some, but as some of the more forward-thinking soldiers and diplomats now propose, and particularly the former, quite a lot can be done and should be done.

The whole British effort should now be concentrated on what is achievable in the south, building confidence and security in the outlying villages and ports like Umm Qasr and Az Zubayr, and trying to achieve some security and hope for repair and regeneration in the Rumailah oilfields. It will also mean regaining control of the streets of Basra, and this may require some force ? otherwise it is heading fast to becoming one of the biggest mafia capitals in the world.

TOUGH choices have to be made. The fractious city of Amarah should be left to the local warlords and retinues of Moqtada al-Sadr, who were voted into office in the elections of last January.

If all this means the British detaching themselves from American operational command on the ground, and merely supporting the US aim in Iraq with the lightest of lip service, so be it. The British now must set their own agenda, timetable and ?end state?; that is, achievable objective. They must silently set a departure date; any public announcement would be counter-productive, a red rag to the insurgents.

Least of all should the soldiers, the service men and women, be put in dock for all this. They have been dealt the trickiest of hands, a conflict that turned out nothing like expected, a black tale with a beginning, little middle and no end.

The curious thing is that so few of the soldiery are that downhearted. Some genu-inely feel that they have done a lot: putting 3,000 schools in order, fixing the sewerage and water supply in Amarah when no one else would go near them.

My contact in Basra summed up his assignment thus, with the irony becoming any self-respecting Guardsman, I suppose: ?There is a very real belief that Iraq is a far better place for the removal of Saddam Hussein, it is just that there are teething problems with those that have replaced him. In time these too will be removed, although not quite so dramatically, and eventually some semblance of decent government will appear ? enshala.?

Robert Fox is a war correspondent who has reported from Iraq throughout the conflict.