MORE THAN THEY COULD CHEW
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President Ford uttered the sentence that sums up Sir Hilary Synnott's absorbing narrative here - `You can't just go around liberating people'. The tale of what happens if you do that with insufficient forethought, planning, resources, afterthought and sense of reality is told to us by a Foreign Office mandarin who brought to his impossible task dedication, loyalty, mental candour and honesty, and top-level experience as High Commissioner in Pakistan when that nation and India, both now with nuclear arms, faced each other in a tense standoff.
This book is hot off the press, published only this year. It complements Rory Stewart's Prince of the Marshes, but it approaches the story of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in southern Iraq from a different angle and tells it in a different manner. Sir Hilary's responsibilities were wider, and his account is not a chronicle. It deals with the issues under subject-headings, and broadly I think it's fair to say that each successive chapter takes a higher-level overview than the last, culminating in the final Summary, the kind of overall assessment that British ambassadors were once expected to provide of their tours of duty. Synnott assesses his own mission as a failure, but by no means as a comprehensive failure. There was no way of being successful under the circumstances. The British army receives considerable commendation from him, but on the civilian side such partial achievements as there were he attributes to specific individuals. As for his own part, he tells us what he did and why with Thucydidean reserve and leaves it to us to judge.
If you are in a hurry, I suppose you could go straight to the Summary, but this book deserves to be read all the way through in the author's sequence, because to a lay reader like me Synnott seems to convey the feel and sense of the posting vividly. His style of writing changes as the material gathers weight, but it is without pretentiousness, indeed I found the volume a page-turner in its clarity and focus. In the early chapters he is not even a particular stickler for the final refinements of syntax or even now and then grammar, and he has some engaging locutions of his own -- `stood no hope' `revealing an American accent' `the light became darker'. What he has in spades is readability throughout, and considering the authority he commands that is a blessing. His final conclusions could not be expected by now to be unique, but they are best read in the light of some of his perceptions along the way, which are illuminating in the extreme. Some of his encounters must have been shattering to him at the time and they are still startling now, but in the bigger picture they are almost anecdotal. He had a standup barney with an Australian whose mantra was `no subsidies' and who met the point that, after certain farmers had used up what should have been the seed-corn there was liable to be unrest threatening security if they were not given a fresh supply, with the insight that security was not his concern. He cites as his lowest point in the assignment a meeting of the regional heads at which they had been invited by Bremer to submit their reactions to a certain plan. Having so submitted they were then told unceremoniously by Bremer that the plan had been presented in Washington, so that was that. This kind of thing sounds like more than passing detail, except that the Australian turned out to have interests that were financial more than ideological, and that Bremer's plan had been not just presented but rubbished in Washington, so that discussion of it was to that extent academic albeit that Bremer was not coming clean why.
At the next level up are the strategic issues. Blair talked about a `war' (indeed we all did), but he made no provisions customary for anything known by that term, so what was his concept of the matter really? Gen Sanchez motivated his troops with the devastating insight that the American effort must not fail or the fighting was going to be in High Street USA, and Sir Hilary's palpable contempt for anyone treating his listeners like idiots in this way came over to me all the more loudly for the way he spotlights the statement and leaves it without further comment. Crucial, of course, were the disastrous MBA-style misjudgments of Bremer that produced de-Baathification and disbandment of the army, not to mention the introduction of a market economy to get them standing on their own two feet and all the rest of it. Synnott is fairly laconic about the mentality that could fail to see the likely effect of creating a whole new class of dispossessed, unemployed and armed citizenry who had all the experience there was going of law-enforcement and civic administration. Indeed I should say at some stage that one of the most attractive aspects of his narration is his patrician reluctance to overemphasise the obvious.
Synnott pinpoints lack of resources as his ultimate reason for the failure, and at the time of his assignment I can see his reasons and also understand his statement that armed violence was not the issue in Basra that it was in Baghdad. He does not update these perceptions, and I don't know why not. The well-intentioned strategy of arming the populace against the crooks, gangsters, smugglers and forgers seems in retrospect to have backfired, although it also seems to be what Gen Petraeus is now doing further north, and getting plaudits for in positive-thinking quarters. It could all have doubtless been done better, but what about the overall objective of spreadin' democracy an' freedom in the middle east? Don Quixote rides again, it seems to me, out of Crawford TX. I wanted to hear more about that.
Having opposed this `war' from day one I actually support Synnott's view that `liberal interventionism', as in Bosnia, Kosovo and even Afghanistan is here to stay and has to be. However we need to be able to distinguish one case from another and to recognise our own limitations. A complete reassessment of policy is glaringly needed. Jerry, you should be with us at this hour, and I don't mean Jerry Bremer.
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Truly revealing book
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I really recommend this book to anyone who is interested in what really happened during one of the most significant events in recent time. "Bad Days in Basra" is as relevant to a journalist as it is to a historian, or someone who simply wants a good read. Synnott recounts his time running Southern Iraq after the fall of Saddam with humour and honesty and what emerges is revelatory.
You can't help feeling that the lack of plan was such an enormous oversight, how come Blair/Bush were not aware that after Saddam fell they needed just to stop and think - what comes next? And while the Americans piled in the cash, the British administration in the South were very under-resourced. Our government, it seems, were busy with other things.
The book gives you a very thorough knowledge of Synnott's experience, and has moments sheer genius. It made me laugh and cry, and has changed many of my preconceptions of what fundamentally went wrong in Iraq - there are lessons to be learnt and this book exposes them.
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