Where there's a will....

Juan Cole, writing this morning, pointed me to the statement by Sir Jeremy Greenstock, a former British diplomat. Sir Jeremy has a number of comments he wanted to make about how the invasion and occupation of Iraq was mishandled. But the Blair government will not let him publish his book.

Fortunately, he has found a way to make an end run. He provided a new forward to the reissue of "Tigris Gunboats: The Forgotten War in Iraq 1914-1917", a memoir by Wilfred Nunnskip. Here are the main comments:

The Telegraph It is a history of the 1914-17 expedition to capture Baghdad by a British expeditionary force for which Nunn led the naval contingent.

Sir Jeremy writes that it was an appallingly bloody campaign, fought against the Ottoman Turkish army in which Britain suffered 40,000 men killed, wounded or captured in a few months.

Eventually Baghdad was taken, but the capture proved nothing but a heartache for the invaders.

"The victory of March 1917 left the British owning the territory of Iraq after the war," writes Sir Jeremy. But it brought them "many years of trial and distress in trying, first through colonial occupation and then through intrusive diplomacy, to stabilise a nation that has rarely in its history remained both united and peaceful.

"Is it too churlish to ask whether the leaders of a more modern administration might have profited from studying this experience?

"It now transpires that many individual American officers did try to learn from Iraq's earlier history.

"But other considerations closer to home were weighing on the top-level decision-makers; there was little delegation of real authority to those in the theatre who could see what the local conditions required; the different parts of the military and civilian systems were out of tune with each other; and the limitations of the use of force were poorly understood.

"That meant that a sense of common purpose was missing after the ousting of Saddam Hussein, which was not the case nine decades earlier."

Sir Jeremy adds: "Neither the British Government in 1917 nor the Coalition in 2003 really understood what they were taking on when they assumed control of Baghdad."

So we are suffering from politicians who don't read or understand history.

The only people who would be surprised by that are going to be those politicians themselves, and that's assuming that somehow they can be made aware of their failure. Not very likely.