Pull troops out now and stand up to Bush, inquiry tells Brown

By Colin Brown

British troops should be pulled out of Iraq even though the violence is likely to get worse, a cross-party commission has told Gordon Brown.

The commission co-chaired by Lord Ashdown, the former Liberal Democrat leader, called for an end to offensive military operations by British forces and a “clear exit strategy”.

The findings stepped up the pressure on the Prime Minister to seek a change of policy on Iraq at his forthcoming summit with President Bush. The report said the UK should “actively and urgently … pursue changes of policy from our allies”.

Mr Bush rejected a vote by Democrats in the House of Representatives last week for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq by April next year. But Lord Ashdown, who turned down a post in Mr Brown’s Cabinet, warned that delaying withdrawal until the US “surge” in Iraq has reduced violence would hand the initiative to the insurgents.

“Our withdrawal rate should be determined not by the security situation - which allows the militias, the insurgents, to determine our withdrawal - but by the state of training of the Iraqi forces,” Lord Ashdown said on the BBC TV AM programme.

“If we can no longer suppress the violence, we are in a sense a target for the violence,” he added. “Therefore, we need to hand this process over to the Iraqis.

“Will things get worse for a bit? They may but they are probably going to anyway. The evidence was that if we cannot suppress the violence we cannot prevent it getting worse. What we need to do is train up the Iraqis.”

He said Tony Blair had “failed to use the leverage” he had to influence Mr Bush’s policy in Iraq and urged Mr Brown not to make the same mistake.

“We committed the cardinal sin of these interventions, which is to have ridiculously over-ambitious aims; to recreate Washington in Baghdad, to recreate a fully-functioning Western-style democracy in a Middle Eastern country,” said Lord Ashdown.

The commission’s recommendations called on the Government to refocus the military objectives to give British troops “a clear exit strategy”.

It said: “This means ceasing offensive military operations and focusing on completing the training of Iraqi security forces. When this job is done, we can withdraw the troops. Our forces should only stay as long as they have a job to do - not on the basis of a set date or artificial timetable.”

The commission was set up by the Foreign Policy Centre, an independent London-based think-tank, and interviewed more than 50 witnesses including Lt-Gen Jay Garner, the former US administrator in Iraq, General Sir Mike Jackson, former head of the British Army, Sir Menzies Campbell, leader of the Liberal Democrats, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s former UN ambassador, the Baghdad blogger, Salam Pax, Dame Pauline Neville Jones, the former intelligence chief and Denis MacShane, a former Foreign Office minister.

The former Labour cabinet minister Baroness Jay, who co-chaired the commission, said: “Iraq needs an economic road map which ensures that as the security situation improves on the ground the economic benefits of peace take root as soon as is humanly possible.”

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