9.6 |
27 June 2007 to April 2008
JAM freeze
and “the emergence of a fragile but real inter-factional political
process”.
But he
warned that the improvement would not be sustained without
political progress:
“There is a
general lack of political drive and leadership. No one in
government
is willing
to accept responsibility for delivery of legislation through the
Council of
Representatives.”
704.
The UK’s
challenge, in Mr Miliband’s view, was “to decide what more it
is that we
can
realistically do to help the country maintain forward momentum”.
The work under
way across
Whitehall to review UK strategy would assist, but:
“My own
initial view is that we should neither start with a numbers game in
terms
of troops,
nor an open ended security commitment driven by commitment
on
economic
development. Instead we need to build on the points of consensus:
that
Iraq
depends on local political leadership supported by the
international community,
that we
have distinctive sunk costs in Iraq but also distinctive assets to
deploy …;
that there
are real foreign policy arguments for continued engagement; but
these
need to be
justified by a clear, coherent and agreed plan for Iraq supported
by the
international
community.”
705.
Mr Prentice
recorded that during his visit Mr Miliband had been briefed
on
negotiations
with JAM1 by Maj Gen Binns, who had explained his emerging
conclusion
that JAM1’s
release “should come sooner rather than later in the remaining
scheduled
706.
The Inquiry
asked Mr Browne whether there was a sense that the UK had
rushed
the pace of
transfer to Iraqi control.330
Mr Browne
considered that, in fact, the reverse
had often
been true: the Iraqis were keen to speed up the process of transfer
but the UK
needed, at
times, to slow the pace down a bit.
707.
In his
book Surge,
Colonel Peter Mansoor (Gen Petraeus’ executive officer
in
2007),
wrote that after transition to PIC:
“The Jaysh
al-Mahdi assumed control of large sections of Basra, inflicting on
its
residents a
severe brand of Shari’a law that forced women to wear the
jihab
[sic]
on pain of
death, closed barber shops and music stores, and generally made
life
miserable
for city residents. The situation proved yet again that without
control
or
protection of the population, counter-insurgency efforts would fail
and the Iraqi
people
would suffer. For his part, Muqtada al-Sadr took credit for forcing
the British
329
Email
Prentice to Hickey, 20 December 2007, ‘Iraq: [NAME OF OPERATION]:
Imminent Release’.
330
Public
hearing, 25 January 2010, pages 37-39.
331
Mansoor
PR. Surge: My
Journey with General David Petraeus and the Remaking of the Iraq
War.
Yale University
Press, 2013.
311