In an interview on Diplomacy

Your next choice is the Thomas Ricks book about Iraq, Fiasco. 

Because Iraq was the seminal event of the end of my career, and because my name is connected in people’s minds, in recent memory at least, with Iraq, both at the UN and in Baghdad, I thought it was right to put on my list a book that tries to explain why Iraq went wrong, particularly after the invasion. Yes, there were a large number of people who were very angry about the principle of going to war in Iraq at all – but, actually, if Iraq had been well handled after the invasion, and it was clear that the state of Iraq and the life of its people was improving as a result of what we had done, a lot would have been forgiven around the decision to go to war with or without the necessary legitimacy. I’ve chosen Thomas Ricks’s book because it is an anecdotal book and a non-judgmental book. It is mainly composed of interviews with soldiers and civilians working on the ground in Iraq, members of the US Armed Forces and Iraqis, people in the Coalition Provisional Authority. As these interviews and anecdotes accumulate, the book shows how difficult it was for people on the ground to try to make sense of the Iraq mission they had been set when their principals back home did not seem to understand the mission or devote the right resources to it, or correct early mistakes soon enough for them not to become existential mistakes for the mission in Iraq. You get a better and more accurate sense of that from Fiasco than from any other book written within five years of the invasion in 2003. That’s why I invite people to read it: to try and understand what happened. A lot of it illustrates the cock-up rather than the conspiracy theory: people don’t mean to make mistakes, they want to do well, a large number of people are busting a gut to do the right thing in the job they’ve been assigned, but the macro picture, the large mission concept, the resources in men and dollars that are put into it and the international and regional structure, for what is supposed to be done, have just not been established in the right way to allow the micro effort that is going into it from all these individuals, to glue together into a success. That’s a big lesson. The mission was wrongly set and the resources were wrongly allocated. And the magnificent work that was done was largely wasted, and lives with it – both the lives of Iraqis and of outsiders.

Your feeling is that it wasn’t a mistake to go into Iraq – the mistake was what happened afterwards, which is what this book describes?

I think the legal grounds were thin, but just about bearable, but the political legitimacy –the degree of support we had internationally – was not broad enough to get the feeling we were doing something on behalf of a wider community, and therefore the legitimacy was lost, which was a mistake that mattered more to the UK than to the US. But the planning and execution of the post-invasion stage could have been much more effectively done. We could have had a chance of being successful in Iraq at a much earlier stage than now. What has happened is that the political process has held good in Iraq, but the security and the economic and social development of Iraq has been much, much too slow. And that in itself has security consequences – and will have political consequences…We don’t know yet whether Iraq will be a success story within the generation after the invasion or not. It does take that long to turn a country around – the same is true for Afghanistan and any other country we try and mend.

In an interview on the Iraq War

Your next choice, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, is by the journalist Thomas Ricks, who spent five tours in Iraq during the conflict.

This is an interesting book, which I have chosen because I think you need a book from the Americans’ side. When you read about Iraq, you need to know that it is a country more divided than almost anywhere else in the world – between groups like Kurds, Sunnis and Shias, and of course the Americans. Each has vigorous internal politics which determines what they do. This was true of the Americans, and Ricks writes fluently and eloquently about this. Sometimes he is unconscious of the degree to which he is reflecting American attitudes which aren’t Iraqi attitudes, but his book does show what the Americans thought, and what they thought the Iraqis thought.

What were some of the common misconceptions on America’s side?

They had great difficulty from the beginning, in that they wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein and to have a friendly government to replace him with. But the only real alternative to Saddam Hussein was a Shia government, which was going to be full of co-religionists with Iran. America was always fearful that Iran would emerge the winner of an American war. That explains an awful lot of what happened subsequently. You had the invasion, which many Iraqis accepted temporarily because Saddam Hussein had been a disastrous ruler. Then you had an occupation which was really because the Americans couldn’t think how to replace Hussein.

Many would argue that even if the Americans and British had thought through what would happen after the overthrow of Hussein, it was still a very difficult thing to manage.

I think one has to read a diversity of books to really understand what happened. The British often have this attitude of “if there had been more occupation troops” or “if things had been a bit better organised” and so forth. But actually the dilemma was very real. What communities and countries were going to be the winners and losers after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein? That was a real dilemma for the Americans, which they never really resolved.

What was it like being on the ground as a journalist?

It was very dangerous, among other things. In other places I have covered – like Lebanon during its civil war – it was rather safer to be a journalist. Even very violent militia groups gave you a pass to get through. In Iraq it was extremely dangerous to be any kind of foreigner, and particularly a journalist. But you could get around and talk to people. I have chosen authors who talked to people, and you do need to use as a source people who were there on the ground. People who weren’t there, even if they had a previous acquaintance with Iraq, often missed what was happening because the situation changed rapidly. You had to be in the thick of it to produce a book which is worth reading.