The British In Iraq (merged thread)

[davidbfpo]

Published 10th March 2008, Sir Hilary Synnott’s Bad Days in Basra: My Turbulent Time As Britain’s Man in Southern Iraq (I.B. Tauris, £17.99). and several reviews on the web. This is from The Spectator (UK):

I am hugely enjoying – if that’s not too inappropriate a word – Synnott, who was our most senior representative in the Coalition Provisional Alliance in the south of the country, is refreshingly candid. "Ultimately," he admits as early as the Prologue, "the CPA (was) a failure". While the subject is of course depressing, shocking and essentially heavy-going, Synnott manages to find a lightness of touch in the telling which makes the book extremely engaging and distinguishes it from other, more relentlessly hard-going Iraq memoirs (at one point Synnott jokes that he almost considered calling his Bugger Basra!) Nevertheless there is a powerful message for the future at the book’s core; namely, that we should treat the "seductive line of argument that the Iraq experience was a worst-case anomaly… that the like will not occur again" with the utmost suspicion. In the current international climate, he argues, "it seems more, not less probable that the international community will be presented with challenges stemming from fragile states which directly or indirectly affect their interests." There is much talk of "lessons" being learnt about Iraq; but lessons, Synnott urges, once learned, must also be applied – no matter how difficult, awkward or expensive. (Let’s hope the US President elect, whoever he or she may be, is taking notes.)

An eminent former High Commissioner who later assumed what he describes as a "bizarre" role, being both ambassador to the Iraqis and the Americans as well as "quasi-colonial governor of four Iraqi provinces", Sir Hilary Synnott was by all accounts one of our most important and intelligent players in post-2003 Iraq. Until now, he has kept a low profile; as we approach the fifth anniversary of the invasion and must contemplate anew the extent and intractability of that "failure", it is a timely moment indeed for his clear-eyed, powerful, and humbling account of what were, and indeed still are, turbulent times.

This is a link to a longer review in The Times: http://entertainment.timesonline.co....cle3465815.ece

Or the Daily Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/m.../08/do0802.xml

davidbfpo