Lord Dannatt
Why the Iraq war was a disaster of biblical proportions
General the Lord Dannatt is sitting at the head of a spacious boardroom table in Millbank House, searching for words. Beyond him, out of the window, is a vista of Parliament Square where on March 20, 2003, thousands gathered to march against the invasion of Iraq.
Today he admires the view, but the war in Iraq is something that until recently Lord Dannatt has not been able to take in from a detached perspective. As Chief of the General Staff between 2006 and 2009, and prior to that Commander-in-Chief Land Command, he was embroiled in the key decisions around the six-year military mission in which 179 British troops lost their lives.
It has been a year in which the unsavoury legacy of the Iraq conflict has been a mainstay of the news. In July, the Chilcot Inquiry delivered a damning verdict on the decision to take Britain to war. Earlier this month, the Ministry of Defence was forced to pay thousands of pounds in compensation to former Army officer Rachel Webster, who was left traumatised after she was arrested by officers working for the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (Ihat), a controversial government unit set up in 2010 to investigate alleged abuses by service personnel during the war. The case followed that of three Army veterans who face prosecution for manslaughter over the death of an Iraqi teenager in 2003.
“The Webster case was appalling and I’m delighted she has been compensated, but that these historic abuse inquiries have been put together at all...” Lord Dannatt says, resolutely echoing the view of numerous veterans, MPs and campaigner groups. “To have these wide-ranging inquiries into what are repeatedly turning out to be wholesale, fallacious accusations is undermining for morale and the Army’s effectiveness. In the future, soldiers will feel inhibited in doing what they think is right for fear of retrospective investigation, and that is incredibly dangerous.”
He admits there are times when errors are made in conflict, but believes any wrongdoing should be dealt with internally.
“We have our own tried and tested military justice system when there is a genuine likelihood that action needs to be taken against individuals, be it sanctions or a court martial,” he says. “The hundreds of allegations put forward by certain legal firms against soldiers in Iraq simply do not add up; it’s an unjustifiable overreaction for fear of the European Court of Human Rights. One of the Army’s six core values is ‘Respect for Others’ – to say we serially ignored that is utterly disrespectful.”
Should other soldiers who have been falsely represented be offered compensation?
“I think there’s a strong case to examine that, if only for future governments to realise the consequences of their actions. An apology is one thing but, if appropriate, there should be financial compensation.”
Lord Dannatt was a prominent figure in the Chilcot Inquiry and the 65-year-old has been choosing his words carefully since its conclusion. Indeed, he left the epilogue of his new book, Boots on the Ground: Britain and her Army since 1945, unwritten until he had heard its findings.
The report found the UK invasion lacked strategy, proper equipment, and was based on a false premise; planning for the campaign was deemed “wholly inadequate”.
So with the benefit of hindsight and a fresh historical perspective, how would the general now describe the war?
Lord Dannatt coughs and peers out of the window once more before selecting the appropriate verbal grenade to lob in to the debate.
“A strategic error of near biblical proportions was made to go into Iraq in 2003,” he says. “There wasn’t a clear plan for what happened next so we really had no option but to muddle through. And of course the muddling through is largely responsible for the ongoing vicious unrest in that part of the Middle East.”
Lord Dannatt lived the war as a commander and a parent. His middle son Bertie (one of four children), a former Captain in the Grenadier Guards, followed his father into the Army and served two tours of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Dannatt came to know the acute fear of having a loved one fighting on a foreign land.
“In the five years I was Commander in Chief and Chief of the General Staff, hardly a day went by when I wasn’t informed about the death of a soldier or very serious injury of soldiers. I was always told as quickly as they could before the name was released publicly, but the protocol was my staff wouldn’t tell me until they knew it wasn’t Bertie. I experienced that nightmare of other people.”
In August, Lord Dannatt spoke about Bertie suffering from depression after taking the anti-malarial drug Larium visiting Africa on his gap year, and apologised to the troops who were handed it out while under his command.
In truth, he tells me, he had far less power over those decisions than people might think. “Someone might think the Chief of General Staff controls all he surveys,” he says ruefully.
While still the head of the British Army in 2006, he famously openly criticised the government’s handling of its wars in the Middle East. A few years later, having left the Army and been ensconced as a Tory peer, he accused Tony Blair and Gordon Brown of letting down troops by a lack of funding and “moral courage”.
Chilcot was damning of Blair, eviscerating his style of government and decision-making.
“I think Chilcot was fair as far as Blair was concerned,” Lord Dannatt says. “It was very interesting listening to his press conference when the report was published and he was doing his best to accept certain responsibility and absolve himself. Then contrast that with when he was on the Today programme the next morning. Having tried to un-skewer himself in his own press conference, he was very well skewered again.”
He admits, though, that he regrets the fall-out from that interview he gave back in 2006.
“It certainly had the beneficial effect that the Army knew its boss knew we had a problem,” he says. “Was it subsequently beneficial in helping me win arguments in the MoD? I think it probably wasn’t. It made my job internally a lot more difficult. But the urgency in 2006 was we were undermanned and our manning risked going over a cliff edge. I knew we didn’t have time.”
Lord Dannatt’s new book is a broad sweep through half a century of tumultuous change, pursuing the theory that the history of the country is entwined with that of the Armed Forces.
It has been several years in the writing and Lord Dannatt offers fascinating insights from the point of view of a soldier. There is, though, one obvious omission: himself.
The author’s name appears only on the front cover; he says he wished to approach it only from the perspective of a historian (as a student, he read economic history at Durham University, where he met his wife).
So was all that bloodshed worth it? While Lord Dannatt the general insists he still believed in the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is an acceptance that they became unwinnable.
Lord Dannatt the historian takes those failures in the Middle East further, holding them up as the postscript to a half-century of decline in Britain’s diplomatic and military prowess.
What new conflicts lie ahead remain to be seen. But while the world boils with the failures of Iraq, he says the era of choosing the wars we fight has come to an abrupt end.
‘The hundreds of allegations put forward by certain legal firms simply do not add up’