Michael Portillo says that the British failure in Basra over the last five years exposes the UK as a paper tiger, unwilling to muster the political will to win when engaging its military.  He gives a caustic summation of the British retreat, noting that the Iraqi Army in its infancy did more than what the world-class Brits could achieve.  The problem isn’t the military, at least not its rank and file, but its leadership and the political class in London:

The fundamental cause of the British failure was political. Tony Blair wanted to join the United States in its toppling of Saddam Hussein because if Britain does not back America it is hard to know what our role in the world is: certainly not a seat at the top table. But, for all his persuasiveness, Blair could not hold public opinion over the medium term and so he cut troop numbers fast and sought to avoid casualties. As a result, British forces lost control of Basra and left the population at the mercy of fundamentalist thugs and warring militias, in particular Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army.

The secondary cause of failure was a misplaced British disdain for America, shared by our politicians and senior military. In the early days in Iraq we bragged that our forces could deploy in berets and soft-sided vehicles while US forces roared through Baghdad in heavily armoured convoys. British leaders sneered at the Americans’ failure to win hearts and minds because of their lack of experience in counterinsurgency. …

Britain’s shaming was completed in March 2008 when Iraqi forces, backed by the US, moved decisively against the Mahdi Army, inflicting huge casualties and removing them from Basra. Operation Charge of the Knights was supervised by Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, exasperated that Iraq’s second city was controlled not by Britain but by an Iranian-backed Shi’ite militia.

Trust in the British had fallen so low that neither the Iraqi nor the US government was willing to give us much notice of the operation. General Mohammed Jawad Humeidi remarked that his forces battled for a week before receiving British support. He rubbed salt in the wound by noting that for five years the Mahdi Army had “ruled Basra without being punished or held to account”, and had during that time controlled ports, oil, electricity and government agencies, whose funds bought them weapons.

Many people will seize on this to score a few points for triumphalism, especially given the public “sneering” provided by British commanders about American efforts over the last few years in Iraq and Afghanistan.  I’d call that a mistake.  While the commanders eventually got proven wrong, at the time they correctly noted American failures which created the vacuum that allowed the uprisings of 2006-7 and the near-disintegration of Iraq to sectarian violence.  They came up with the wrong solution, but they weren’t entirely wrong, either.

Also, while Portillo scolds Britain for its lack of political will, it’s still good to remember that the UK showed considerably more political will than other nations in Iraq.  The Spaniards bugged out after the Madrid bombings, and other members of the Coalition gradually left the front as well.  Britain’s forces still fight on the front lines in Afghanistan alongside Americans, Canadians, Australians, and a few other nations (update: like the Danes) that don’t refuse to engage in combat.  The British remain our friends, and while they have made some serious errors in Iraq, they stuck around until almost the very end and remain by our side in Afghanistan.

The lack of political will is a problem that doesn’t just afflict Britain, either.  The US has shown a remarkably short supply of it in Iraq, if not yet in Afghanistan.  Bush bucked a rising tide of public opposition to the war to raise troop levels in Iraq, in part because he had the political cover of a federal system instead of the parliamentary system Britain has.  Had Tony Blair followed suit and sent several brigades to bolster the Basra forces and start using much more aggressive tactics and strategies that initially raised casualties as we did, he probably would have seen his government toppled.  Bush didn’t have that concern.

Portillo’s scolding about political will applies to most Western nations, including ours.  Once we’re in a war, we’d better win it, regardless of how we got into it in the first place.  All of the other options are worse.  That’s not just a recipe for policy once we’re in the war, but for picking fights carefully in the first place.