UK must learn lessons from Iraq
The government has admitted that lessons must be learnt from Iraq about how to deal with post-conflict situations.
Coalition forces were “insufficiently prepared” for the scale of the Iraqi insurgency, it says in a paper released today.
It adds that pre-war planning failed to reflect the “wide range of predictions” made about what the country would be like after an invasion.
The paper is a response to a report by the defence select committee, which criticised coalition forces for failing to predict the “resentment” from Iraqis and the potential for insurgency.
“No post-conflict mission in the last 60 years has been as challenging as that which faced the coalition in June 2003,” the committee said.
Responding to the committee’s report today, the government agreed there was a failure to predict how much coalition forces would be resented by some Iraqis, and how their presence could be portrayed as “cultural and economic imperialism”.
The coalition failed to predict the extent to which security forces in Iraq would simply collapse following the invasion and only started to build up new Iraqi police, soldiers and security forces belatedly, and not in a well-coordinated way, the paper states.
But it acknowledges that the UK had to deal with a very difficult situation following the end of the war. British forces had to adapt to the position of being an occupying power for the “first time in recent history” as well as dealing with an insurgency made up of different groups wanting different ends.
The paper commends the work of the British forces in the south of Iraq, saying they have helped create a more “permissive environment” in that part of the country.
The original defence committee reports suggested that British soldiers would have to stay in Iraq until at least 2006 because of the time it would take to train Iraqi soldiers to replace them.
In response, the government says British forces will remain “until they are confident that Iraqi security forces can provide the necessary security”.
In a separate move, the Iraqi interim prime minister Ibrahim Jaafari has announced he would like to see a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
