The Times of London: Time to get out of Iraq

HARK — CAN YOU hear it? Borne on the wind, can you hear the sounds of construction — of hammers hammering and woodsaws sawing? And do you detect a note of panic? I do. The good ship Neocon is going down. She has struck the Iraqi rocks, the engine room is awash, and on the deck in anxious pursuit of something to float them away is a curious assembly.

Matthew Parris said that very well. Love those Brits when they set out to paint a word-picture.

They are building a lifeboat for their reputations. The task is urgent. It is no small thing to find oneself on the wrong side of an argument when the debate is about the biggest disaster in British foreign policy since Suez; no small thing to have handed Iran a final, undreamt-of victory in an Iran-Iraq war that we thought had ended in the 1980s; no small thing to have lost Britain her credit in half the world; no small thing — in the name of Atlanticism — to have shackled our own good name to a doomed US presidency and crazed foreign-policy adventure that the next political generation in America will remember only with an embarrassed shudder.

I swear to God - I wrote about Suez before I read this editorial. But I admit to feeling giddy at this moment - if I am on the same page with Matthew Parris, I'm likely to be downright insufferable for a bit.

It is no small thing to have embellished the philosophy, found the prose and made the case for the most almighty cock-up in politics that we are ever likely to witness. They meant for the best, these politicians, dreamers and writers. They didn’t think it would end like this. But it has: more killed than even Saddam could boast, and nothing to show for it but an exhausted British Army and the global energising of violent Islamism on a scale of which Osama bin Laden never dreamt.
Our British neocons have invested heavily in this ill-fated craft, and the wreck is total. How shall they be saved? Never fear. They’ve been working on the elements of a rescue plan. By Christmas all will be singing from the same sheet. All together, now, warrior-columnists and soon-to-be-former Cabinet ministers: one, two three . . .
“The principle was good but the Americans screwed up the execution.”
Oh diddums, guys. Damned awful luck. You had this fantastic plan for invading a foreign country and harnessing a grateful populace behind your ideas for rebuilding an Arab nation along better lines — and then along come the Americans and make a mess of it. Now why in Heaven’s name would they do a thing that? Vandals.

And then we - the United States - are alone in Iraq with 16 Dominicans and a Russian advisor.

As Parris so aptly analogized, the ship has hit the rocks and is going down. The Brits, who have a history in the region that they should have reminded their own Neocon chuckleheads about before they sailed into these dangerous waters, are more prone to take the long view. But they have a more informed populace who is more likeley to remind then that

Funny, because I don’t quite recall most of you saying it at the time — some of you wrote columns and some of you delivered speeches declaring that Iraq was making giant strides; most of you blamed the difficulties on “Saddam loyalists and foreign fighters”, and some of you actually visited and returned rejoicing at the progress — but let’s overlook that. Let’s for the sake of argument grant that you worried from the start that the US just didn’t have the hang of this nation-building business. Now, you declare, we know that’s the reason the whole strategy hit the rocks.
Crap. The strategy failed because of one big, bad idea at its very root. Your idea that we kick the door in. Everything has flowed from that.
We were not invited. We had no mandate. There were no “good” Iraqis to hand over to. We had nothing to latch on to, no legitimacy. It wasn’t a question of being tactful, respectful, munificent, or handing sweets to children. We were impostors, and that is all.

Dannat speaking up was no slip-up. The Brits are out by 01 March.