As a job description “King of the South” is fairly hard to beat, implying as
it does certain levels of power and comfort, with perhaps a few palm-fringed
beaches thrown in. Unfortunately, the South in this case was southern Iraq,
three months after the fall of Saddam.
Instead of a palace, or even the ambassadorial luxury that he was used to, our
man in Basra found himself camped in the ramshackle offices of the city’s
electricity company and expected to provide his own bedding.
Nor was the job itself at all what he had expected. Part of his remit was to
distribute largesse to the locals, but that meant first going cap-in-hand to
the Americans for money. And along the way he had to cope with the fall-out
from ill-advised policies conceived in Washington and fight off bizarre
interventions – such as an Australian attempt to offload a shipment of
scabby-mouthed sheep.
“There was a complete absence of any plan,” says Sir Hilary Synnott, 62, who
recounts his experiences in a book entitled Bad Days in Basra, published
this month, five years on from the invasion. “I was sent to Basra with no
piece of paper in my hand.”
As the title suggests this is no gentle portrayal. The harrumphs of this
seasoned diplomat are audible throughout – and he even admits now that he
was tempted to call the book Bugger Basra. “It was more than two years after
I came back before I could sit down and write it,” he explains. “I couldn’t
have written it before because I was just in such a blind fury.”
The lack of any structure to his mission was anathema to a bureaucrat, while
the lack of facilities epitomised the shambolic nature of the postwar
planning.
“The biggest mistake was the fundamental one of going in to run a country,
having believed people who were telling lies, and base it all on hope rather
than on a plan,” he says. “Everything else arose from that.”
The phone call offering him the post of regional co-ordinator for southern
Iraq came in June 2003, shortly after Synnott had returned from being High
Commissioner to Pakistan. He was looking forward to a quiet retirement,
tending his apple trees in a Hampshire village.
Synnott can hardly claim he knew nothing about the potential problems. His
predecessor – a Danish ambassador – had quit because of lack of American
support. The head of the Foreign Office’s Iraq unit told him candidly: “It’s
a bloody mess.” Clearly not a modest man (in his book, Synnott claims to
have steered India and Pakistan back from the verge of nuclear war), he
decided that he could not resist the challenge – particularly when it was
couched in terms of being “King of the South”.
The first shock was arriving in July 2003 to find his team camped in a former
Basra government building, sleeping four or five people to a room in
temperatures as high as 49C (120F). Hygiene arrangements were “primitive”
with “converted squat loos” and showers consisting of pipes leading from
tanks on the roof, where the water would get so hot that staff had to wait
until after 1am for it to be cool enough to use.
“There wasn’t any conception in London of what the situation was like,” he
said. “I was a guinea pig . . . When I first went out, I took one piece of
hand luggage and that didn’t include towel or soap, much less sheets – all
of which I found I needed.”
On top of that, he says, “everything had to be created from nothing but
against a background where it was not clear what the task was. There was no
staff structure and it was haphazard who one would find there and what
skills they had and how long they would stay. People came for three months
and, as I arrived, many were leaving – with no replacements.”
He was told to report to both Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA) set up by the Americans to run Iraq, and Tony Blair. But
Bremer seemed indifferent while the prime minister’s public utterances – and
personal assurances to Synnott – were not backed up by action.
“To start with, I wasn’t angry but frustrated,” said Synnott. “I’d had the
most authoritative possible statements of political intent from the prime
minister himself – but it quickly became clear that they were not being
reflected in practical terms. There seemed to me a great mismatch between
what he was saying and how Whitehall was operating.
“Hardly any Whitehall departments got involved with Iraq. There was none of
the mobilising of the government machine – with cabinet committees,
ministers and individuals nominated to deal with specific tasks, and
taskforces – such as happened during the second world war in anticipation of
victory. Instead, there was an ad hoc cabinet committee, where both
chairmanship and participants changed.”
One of the incidents he recounts in the book is when Blair visited Basra in
January 2004. Having been informed by No 10 that the prime minister intended
to focus on the civilian effort, Synnott was furious to learn that Blair
would visit only the military. “I was told in no uncertain manner by one of
his acolytes from Labour party HQ that this was an opportunity for the PM to
be seen with British troops.”
In the end, they squeezed in half an hour for Blair to meet Synnott’s team and
the governor of Basra, but the Iraqi press were not allowed in for security
reasons and the visiting British press had all been bundled off in a bus to
be able to photograph the prime minister arriving at the next military
location.
“Even the greatest supporters of Mr Blair would not say he was a master at the
process of governance,” Synnott reflected. “He was much more one who set a
direction but didn’t necessarily ensure it was carried out.”
But, he added, “perhaps you shouldn’t set a direction unless you are confident
it can be carried out. That’s one of the great lessons of Iraq – you need to
set a policy which is consistent with what is possible”.
Meanwhile, his other boss – Bremer – made it clear that he did not want a
“King of the South”, and that Baghdad was all that mattered.
Their first meeting was hardly auspicious. “It felt a bit like entering the
headmaster’s study. I was kept waiting; then once I went in, I was kept
waiting further until he’d finished reading. Then we sat down, he put his
feet on the coffee-table and he delivered a reprimand to me about the
behaviour of the British military.
“It quickly became clear that I could expect little help or guidance from
Baghdad. I had to get my team working effectively, if necessary despite
Baghdad.”
Bremer’s early decisions to disband the Iraqi army and implement a
deBa’athification programme that in effect eliminated the top four levels of
management in all state-owned enterprises were, says Synnott, “profound
mistakes, absolutely profound”. Instead, the country had “an infant
bureaucracy, set up from nothing, attempting to run an entire country of
more than 25m people – so it was chaotic”.
Synnott was also horrified by the CPA itself, which he called “the Bubble”
because it was cut off from Iraqis and mainly staffed by “US political
animals who were young, naive, pushy people issuing orders that were quite
inappropriate and therefore counterproductive”.
As an example, he cites “the view from Baghdad that an essential part of
democracy included a free-market economy – which meant privatising all state
industries, which were the main providers of industrial labour, and doing
away with sub-sidised food baskets”.
His arguments against these plans fell on deaf ears and he was left to deal
with the consequences. “Not only were these policies a waste of time and
money but, more than that, they meant that the state-owned enterprises
collapsed.
“Here you had an infrastruc-ture which was on its last legs anyway – held
together by chew-ing-gum and chicken wire, as one general said – and to let
it go meant tremendous knock-on consequences that no one was thinking about.
All the result of misguided western conceptions that Iraq could be turned
into some prosperous Midwest state – or even Camberley.”
But there was a crucial reason why he could not be too openly critical of the
Americans. “I had to have their money so I couldn’t antagonise them,” he
said. “My team would go up to Baghdad and come back with cases filled with
dollars – millions of dollars. That was how things operated. By the time I
left, they had found they had more than they could spend.”
He refused to be pushed into saying that things were better in the south
because the British were more capable. “Everyone tried to get me to say
that. There were even cabinet ministers saying the Brits are doing it best
because of Northern Ireland, etc. This infuriated the Americans. The fact
was that conditions in Basra were much easier than in Baghdad, so we could
get out and meet people and form political judgments.
“We also had a number of people who were expert technically and in languages
and culture. My political adviser was an Arabist who’d been dealing with
Iraq for over a decade, so the advice he gave me was streets ahead of
anything ambassador Bremer received in Baghdad.”
However, time was of the essence, which was what made the slowness of
Whitehall to agree to any of his requests all the more frustrating. “It was
a race to gain people’s confidence and support by showing that we could
improve their situation. No amount of talk could do that – it had to be
reality on the ground.
“Set against us were forces working in the other direction – criminality and
accretion of power. Of course, we lost that battle severely.”
The conditions for Synnott’s own team improved when, using the excuse of
security, he managed to move his team into one of Saddam’s former palaces.
Although he continued to work 16-hour days, the compound at least had a bar
and a gym where he could listen to Van Morrison on his headphones as a way
of chilling out.
But his task was not helped by some countries’ attitude to Iraq. He cites the
Australians’ attempts to offload a shipload of 50,000 live sheep that had
been refused entry to Saudi Arabia because they had developed a skin disease
called scabby mouth.
A furious row ensued when Synnott insisted that the Iraqis would see the
presentation of a consignment of diseased sheep for use in rituals as an
insult.
Nor was Synnott’s work helped by a great deal of endemic corruption – though
he argues that in his situation you just had to accept it. “You had to be
prepared to waste resources because you didn’t know whether you could trust
contractors – and why should you trust them? With any money paid to a
contractor, there is bound to be a lot lost.”
Work on rebuilding Iraq came to an abrupt halt when the US Congress introduced
close accounting procedures. “That dried everything up,” said Synnott. “We
had to go out to tender, draw up contracts. We had no knowledge of
accounting procedures, let alone American accounting procedures.”
By October 2003 it had become clear that “whatever imperative we on the ground
needed in practice, an externally imposed bureaucracy – mainly from the US –
rendered this very, very difficult. It was what Bremer called ‘the
80,00-mile screwdriver’”.
Finally, in November, Bremer revealed his plan for Iraq, which included taking
power away from the provinces. “When I saw it,” said Synnott, “my heart sank
because it was so full of nonsense that was quite inappropriate for a
developing country. It led to an explosion from the American generals, who
saw it as totally unrealistic.”
The plan became hypothetical because, within 10 days of its announcement, the
decision was taken in Washington to close the CPA by the following June. “In
other words, “said Synnott, “it had been a failure.”
By then security in Basra had deteriorated, making it difficult to carry out
any projects. “It was partly because we couldn’t keep up with aspirations
and also that we couldn’t insulate the south from the growing insurgency.”
That became clear on November 12 when a truck bomb was driven into the
building housing Italian army personnel in the southern town of Nasiriyah,
blowing up nearly 30 Italian cara-binieri and soldiers.
The single most damaging incident in relations with the Iraqis was the Abu
Ghraib prison scandal, Synnott feels. A report by Gareth Davies, the
governor of Pentonville prison, who visited the American-run jails, had
described them as “a long way from conforming to international norms”. But
Synnott was horrified when, a few months later, the extent of abuse of
prisoners at Abu Ghraib became clear.
“It was really demoralising,” he said. “We ostensibly liberated Iraq for
ethical reasons and these revelations made it difficult to sustain an
ethical argument when dealing with our Iraqi friends. There was no way you
could describe it as an inevitable side effect for the greater good.”
But Synnott points out that the political situation in Basra was different
from the sectarian fighting of the centre. “In Basra it was a squabble
between three Iraqi Shi’ite factions – the Badr brigade, the Jaish al-Mahdi
led by the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and the al Fadhila party – and
all linked very closely to criminality. In a sense, there’s not much any
outsider can do. You can try and keep a lid on it and prevent access to
heavy weaponry, but this is Iraqis fighting on their own turf for their own
reasons.”
For this reason, he does not view the recent withdrawal of British troops from
the former Saddam palace as a defeat. “I can see why all Iraqi factions
would try and gain credit for apparently driving the Brits out, but there
really wasn’t much role for the Brits or anybody. The violence is about
squabbling over shares of power and, to a very large extent, criminal
proceeds.”
Although he believes that the situation has improved, others say a final
all-out battle for Basra is “inevitable” and that persistent violence will
keep British troops mired in southern Iraq longer than expected.
Even now the former King of the South is surprisingly optimistic about the
country’s future. “It will never be tidy,” he said. “But then lots of
countries aren’t tidy, and that should never have been our aspiration.”
Bad Days in Basra, by Hilary Synnott, is published by IB Tauris
