Bad Days in Basra: My Turbulent Time as Britain's Man in Southern Iraq by Hilary Synnott
I.B. Tauris, £17.99; 287pp

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Basrayatha: The Story of a City by Muhammad Khudayyir, translated by William Hutchins
Verso, £7.99; 182pp

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WE REACHED BASRA by helicopter at sunset, by far the best time of day to view Iraq's southern port. The city's famed palm trees and waterways were bathed in a golden light as the blistering heat of the day subsided. Once on the ground, however, reality immediately intruded. The streets were filled with columns of skinny, gaunt Iraqi soldiers in muddy uniforms.

The thud of artillery shook the sandy ground underfoot. Those citizens still living in Basra feared that any moment their homes would be overrun. This was the scene that greeted me 20 years ago when Basra was on the front line of the Iran-Iraq war, one of the most brutal and bloody conflicts of our time, when one million people perished in grinding trench warfare.

Fast-forward to today, and again Basra has become a battlefield, this time between the fledgling Iraqi Army, backed by American and British troops, and the Shia militias who are fighting to keep control of the streets. The combatants may have changed but the effect on the city is much the same. Locals live in fear for their lives. The city's canals are blocked by rubbish. Raw sewage runs through the streets. What was once an attractive port city, dubbed the Venice of the Middle East, slips ever farther into decay.

Hilary Synnott, a veteran diplomat, was ten days away from retirement, contemplating growing roses and settling back into Britain after a career served abroad, when the Foreign Office phoned to ask whether he would like to run the British operation in Basra. The city had recently been captured by British troops and Tony Blair wanted a British official to head the reconstruction operation and the effort to replace Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party regime with a new, prosperous democratic Iraq.

In his honest, funny but ultimately depressing account of Britain's failure in southern Iraq, Synnott admits that he was tempted to refuse the job but knew that he would regret not having taken part in one of the most extraordinary episodes of our time.

His assignment started to go wrong from the start. When he asked for written instructions on his duties, his superiors in Whitehall seem surprised. Eventually a vaguely worded document covering half a side of A4 was produced and Synnott was sent on his way with orders to “play it by ear”.

What he found on his arrival is what we now commonly know as the failure of postwar planning. He did not have the staff, the resources or even a plan to run an area the size of small European country, with a restless population expecting miraculous improvements from their Western occupiers. To make matters worse he was serving in the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the US-led occupation government, which was focused primarily on Baghdad and had little time for Basra's problems. Synnott calculates that in the first year of the occupation a mere $6.7 million (£3.3 million) was actually spent by the CPA on reconstruction in the south, one of the most depressed areas of Iraq.

We will probably never know whether post-invasion Iraq could have been salvaged if the Anglo-American Coalition had avoided the disastrous decisions and planning failures that helped to propel the country into a new round of conflict. Synnott makes the point that it is likely that the West will have to intervene again somewhere in the world and that we should at least learn from our mistakes. His book certainly sets out how not to do it in future.

The diplomat's frank, factual account covers only one tiny episode in Basra's long history. Muhammad Khudayyir, on the other hand, takes a far longer perspective. In his rambling, charming and sensitive history of his home town, the Iraqi writer describes a city of boatmen, porters and prostitutes that became a staging post for caravans crossing the desert.

Although his account does not translate particularly well into English, he reminds us that Basra does not have to be synonymous with war and suffering. In his version, al-Zubayr, a notorious suburb of Basra known for roadside bombs and killings, is in fact famous for its shoemakers. The silted Shatt al-Arab waterway, blocked by the sunken hulks of freighters and Saddam's luxury yacht, was at one time a great port for goods travelling to the Gulf and beyond.

The writer still lives in Basra and has witnessed its decline and shared in its suffering. But his story at least offers the hope that happier times may yet return to this luckless city.

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