Frank Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan

Frank Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2011, viii + pp.267, Notes, bibliography, Index, ISBN 978-0-300-16671-2

I consider it to be the duty of anyone who sees a flaw in the plan not to hesitate to say so

General Einsenhower immediately before General Montgomery’s briefing for Operation Overlord, 15^th May 1944

© Frank Ellis 2012 All Rights Reserved

Anger and shame assailed me when I was reading Losing Small Wars: anger with a corrupt Prime Minister (Blair) for the lies used to justify the deployment of British forces to Iraq and Afghanistan and the professional collusion of senior officers and the security services in the dissemination of the lies; and shame for the untold misery inflicted on Iraqi and Afghan civilians, the deaths and maiming of our soldiers and the lies used to comfort their families and to mislead the public. As if this was not bad enough, we are confronted at every turn in these badly judged deployments with far too many examples of incompetent political and military leadership in theatre. With all these failings and the scale of the invasion and occupation in Iraq, and the NATO mission in Afghanistan, Ledwidge’s title hardly does justice to what is revealed. In any case these are hardly ‘small wars’: the lying alone was and remains even now on a mass industrial scale.

If, having read Losing Small Wars, I had to identify the single most important failing about the disastrous British interventions in Iraq and, currently Afghanistan, it would be the failure on the part of the British government and its military advisers to spell out quite clearly why the British armed forces were ever deployed to these two parts of the Middle East. Factor out the obvious lies disseminated by Blair and his political-military clique that Iraq was armed with weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and that these weapons posed a threat to Britain and there was no justified reason for Britain’s ever having had anything to do with the US-led invasion of Iraq. Bush’s ravings that Saddam Hussein was another Hitler reflect the appalling ignorance of American presidents about the world. Such claims were intended to provide some weak justification for Saddam Hussein’s removal from power. Nevertheless they are pitiful claims. By the standards of Arab leaders Saddam Hussein was averagely repressive. Oil is a factor on the Middle East but did it require that the US and others invade Iraq and inflict such dreadful misery and suffering? If we went there to impose democracy and other Western abstractions then that too has been a catastrophic failure and one that was bound to be in a part of the world where Islam rules. Why do Americans and their too willing British allies not realise that the liberal democracies that evolved in a small part of northern Europe among small groups of racially homogenous peoples cannot be just imposed on what are Third World tribal societies? Here we see a deadly serious failure of imagination, caused by what Pat Buchanan has correctly identified as democratic fundamentalism and which has been made to appear fallaciously plausible by the malevolent ideology of multiculturalism and neo-conservatism.

As for the British Army’s being in Afghanistan, no British politician has yet provided a convincing argument for the deployment. Brown’s claims that British troops in Afghanistan made the UK safer were obvious lies and so obviously clumsy one wonders why he thought he could get away with peddling such nonsense. Equally mendacious are the claims that UK forces are helping the Afghan population to build a better future. Do the Taliban – they are part of the Afghan population – want our help? How do we help people by laying their country waste and imposing utterly alien institutions such as elections and education and undermining the foundations of a tribal society? Other possible reasons for our being there may be related to Iran’s nuclear ambitions and fears about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons (and oil, of course). But even these are not that convincing when trying to find an explanation for why Britain has expended so much blood and treasure. Remove any geo-political considerations and one is left with the interests and rivalries of the three services. Ledwidge refers to remarks made by General Dannatt to a British diplomat that if the British army, with an exit date from Iraq established, did not redeploy its battle groups to Afghanistan, they would be removed in any Strategic Defence Review. Ledwidge also suggests that the British army wanted to go to Helmand to show what it could do and attempt to compensate for its less than glorious performance in southern Iraq. Another factor prompting the deployment was, as always, a desire on the part of senior British politicians and officers to ingratiate themselves with the Americans, to try to rebuild their damaged stock. 

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