Do you believe that British troops should still be in Iraq?
This is an incredibly difficult question to answer. You can't even begin to answer without considering the history. Long before the invasion President Bush was talking about regime change in Iraq. He stopped when it was pointed out that to invade a country to change the ruler would be illegal. But I remain of the opinion that regime change was one thing that was in his mind. He also claimed that Iraq was behind the attack on New York on 11 September. Even his own security services said this was not the case. Then there came the big issue of WMDs. Hey, there is no doubt that Saddam's regime was one of the worst in the world. There is no doubt that he wanted WMDs. He used gas on the Kurds and he'd quite possibly have used nukes on Israel and/or Iran if he had them. What strikes me is that he was not the worst regime in the world, just one of the worst, and no-one is going after any of the others. By the time the war began the UN inspectors were pretty sure WMDs did not exist, so it looks rather suspicious. Someone was misled, and it may be that we and the Americans were misled by our own governments. That would be bad, if it were so.
So, point 1, it's doubtful at least that we had any right to go to war in the first place. But now we're there. Are we helping a properly elected democratic regime (the only one in the Arab world)? It's an interesting question. Remember Churchill said that democracy is the worst possible form of government, except for every other sort. That's our experience. Others might not agree, or not agree yet, and I am not sure that you can foist democracy on a nation. Democracy requires certain conditions to thrive, and I am not sure those exist in the Arab countries, just as they don't seem to exist in Russia, which keeps staggering from one form of dictatorship to another, the Tsars included, with brief flirtations with democracy in between almost as light relief. And you have to remember that there has recently been a democratic election which produced a government that the West has done everything in its power to undermine, in Gaza. We love democracy so long as it produces the right results. That's point 2. Saddam was bad, but the democracy Iraq has now may be worse.
Point 3 is that we don't seem to be doing a lot of good. Some people say that the presence of foreign troops, or at least the presence of non-Islamic troops, is what is causing the insurgency, and that Iraq would be a lot easier to govern if we were not there. Maybe - who can tell? Not me certainly. But from here it does seem that things are not getting any better and are probably getting worse.
Lastly, point 4, it seems to me that we violated Iraq. Even if the invasion was justified and legal we messed up big time by having no workable plans for what happened next. Some of the things that were done were incredibly short sighted and directly led to a lot of problems for Iraqis. Therefore we have a debt to Iraq. It is our responsibility (the US and the UK) to get Iraq as much back on its feet as we can.
The question is "how"? If it calls for troops, builders, civil engineers, educators, doctors and nurses, medicines, power stations, then so be it. If it calls for diplomacy involving the other states in the region, then so be it. And if bringing the troops home and replacing them with technicians, so be it. We've got into a win/lose dichotomy. That's the wrong way to look at it. We should be asking how we can be constructive, how we can benefit Iraq and Iraqis, and stop trying to ensure we are the victors and don't lose face.
That's the best I can do.
