SMRs and AMRs

Monday, October 08, 2007

Government ‘gave public false hopes’ on achieving Iraq goals

Michael Evans, Defence Editor
The Times of London

The Government as a whole gave the public “false and inflated expectations” of what could be achieved by British troops in Iraq, its top military adviser has admitted to The Times.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, the Chief of Defence Staff, said that it would take “many years” for conditions to improve substantially in Basra. He also revealed that there were no plans to establish a “permanent British base” in Iraq.

In a wideranging interview, Sir Jock was also sceptical of the call by General Sir Richard Dannatt, the head of the Army, for homecoming parades for troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. “I think a lot of units wouldn’t want parades,” he said.

Sir Jock decided to speak out because of his growing concern that the public are failing to appreciate what the British troops have been doing in southern Iraq.

“All they get are snapshots, which are sometimes really good and sometimes really bad,” he said. “In my view, and contrary to what many people may think, the British military in the south of Iraq, against some quite daunting odds, has been successful, and the nonsense about the British having failed in Basra is completely misjudged.”

However, he added: “Of course, it does depend upon recognising what the mission was in the first place, and I’m afraid we did allow some false and inflated expectations to arise. But the mission for the military was to get the place and the people to the state where the Iraqis could run that bit of their country if they chose to.”

He added: “I think we didn’t do a good job, frankly, of setting out the strategic prospect . . . and we have not done as well as we should have done at thinking strategically. I’m talking here not just about the military.”

(Continued here.)

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