10/07/2016
It never occurred to me there might be a direct link between the British military occupation of southern Iraq and Brexit. But there are links and Booker makes them
in his column. They both represent great failures of statesmanship, and they both show how much we need a proper leader.
Booker starts of offering "as shrewd a comment as any" on the two political dramas currently filling the headlines, which originated from the 19th-century Liberal politician who was described as "the greatest Parliamentary orator of his age".
"The art of statesmanship", observed John Bright, "consists as much in foreseeing as in doing". In other words, few things are more important in politics than to anticipate the likely consequences of one's actions and how others might respond.
The truth of this is writ through the Chilcot report, like writing though a stick of rock, but it is also becoming self-evident in the aftermath of the vote to leave the EU. In each case, what we see is the glaring failure of the key players in the drama to have given proper forethought as to what should be done next if the first step in a sequence turns out the way it did.
Some of the most trenchant passages in Chilcot focus on the complete failure of the Blair government and our top Army generals to foresee how to respond to what followed when, after the invasion in 2003, we were given charge of occupying south-eastern Iraq.
Despite expert warnings, as Chilcot finds, as to what we might expect, even today most people in Britain still have no real idea of just what a shambles we made of that task, beginning with the decision to slash our forces from 43,000 to 11,000.
So badly did we misread the situation in every way that our troops were hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with a growing insurgency, which used road-side bombs to blow up those Snatch Land Rovers which the generals hubristically imagined would enable us to patrol Iraq just as we had done in Northern Ireland.
As Chilcot notes, they resisted any attempt to supply mine-protected vehicles because of their wanting to reserve £16 billion of the defence budget for hi-tech vehicles to provide our main contribution to the then-planned European Rapid Reaction Force.
In 2006 we suffered a humiliating defeat in our failure to capture Al-Amarah, the city which had become the bomb-making centre for the whole of Iraq. In 2007 we suffered even worse humiliation when we had to negotiate with the insurgents to allow our troops to retreat from Basra to its airport.
Properly equipped US and Iraqi forces then had to step in to carry out the task at which we had so lamentably failed, by retaking Basra and Al-Amarah.
Finally, in 2008, we were contemptuously ordered by Iraq's prime minister to leave his country. Our failure to foresee the nature of the challenge which faced us in 2003 led to one of the worst political and military defeats Britain has ever suffered, inflicting damage to the Army's reputation and morale which has lasted to this day.
Similarly, our failure to have worked out in advance any practical plan for how to leave the EU has left us in the shambles we are in today, where no politician has any real idea of how we can execute the people's wishes.
Theresa May insists that "Brexit means Brexit" and Angela Leadsom may have campaigned to Leave. But neither has yet given us any practical clue as to how they would seek to achieve this goal.
We are looking at two of the greatest failures of statesmanship in modern politics, each reflecting a retreat from any grown-up ability to anticipate political reality into little more than emasculated wishful-thinking.
One symptom of this has been the wish to portray our next prime minister as "the new Mrs Thatcher". But not for nothing was she known as "the only man in the Cabinet". In this age of blinkered groupthink, Booker concludes, "I fear we no longer have such a man of either sex today".
