News

.... a weekly column from Michael Howard MP

4 April 2007

 

I devoutly hope that by the time you read this, our Naval personnel who have been kidnapped by the Iranians will have been released. Until that moment arrives our thoughts and prayers are with them.

In any event, this seems an appropriate moment to take stock of the situation in Iraq, which is of course the backdrop to the present crisis. Just four years ago, the world was celebrating the downfall of Saddam Hussein. Where did it all go wrong?

I supported the war. And, although I and everyone else were misled by the dishonest way in which Tony Blair presented the intelligence, I still think that it was right to take action to rid the world of an evil dictator whose tyrannical rule had led to the deaths of large numbers of his own people and was a clear threat to the peace of the region and therefore to the wider world.

But, unlike some of the apologists for Messers Blair and Bush, I am prepared to face the fact that we are now in a disastrous mess. Why?

I believe that the answer lies in what happened after the invasion. Despite the urgings of the Conservative party at the time, there was no plan for what to do after Saddam was deposed. Or, to be more precisely accurate, there was a plan which had been prepared by Colin Powell, then the US Secretary of State, but it was ignored because President Bush listened instead to Donald Rumsfeld, his now discredited Defence Secretary. Most foolishly of all the Iraqi army and police were disbanded, instead of being left in place under new command, so there was a huge power vacuum which was soon filled by the insurgents.

My main criticism of Tony Blair is that he failed to take advantage of the very strong bargaining power he had at the time to influence President Bush to listen to Colin Powell rather than to Mr Rumsfeld. Had he done so I believe that many of the mistakes made at the time could have been avoided and the situation we face today would be very different.

Today the most important thing to achieve in Iraq is to bring the militias under control. So long as there are armed forces in the country, loyal not to the elected Government but to individual politicians or even foreign powers, law and order will never come to that unhappy country. Whether that can be achieved is the biggest unanswered question we face.