US authority accused of ignoring allies in Iraq

Andrew Bearpark, probably the Coalition Provisional Authority's central British figure, has described the US-led administration set up to run Iraq following the invasion in 2003 as a "dysfunctional organisation" which almost completely ignored the British.

When he asked for details of the plan to restore the Iraqi power supplies, he was given a one-page piece of paper with a list of a dozen Iraqi power stations and their potential output, amounting to what he describes as "a wish list". "That was the CPA plan", he said in an interview with the Guardian.

He described Britain as "being complicit in Iraq's current position as a failed state due to its the failure to prepare a postwar plan."

Bearpark has backed the Tory cries for an official British inquiry into the failure of postwar planning, a cry which Brown has so far resisted.

Mr Bearpark said: "If we are going to take upon ourselves the right to invade people's countries and kill people - which is what we do with maybe the most laudable objectives - it puts an incredible moral responsibility upon us to do it as well as we possibly can." He said he was not interested in a "witchhunt", or going over old ground about intelligence, but described "the absence of proper planning in Iraq as criminal negligence".

Mr Bearpark, a veteran of reconstructions in Bosnia and Kosovo, was initially asked to operate as the deputy to Paul Bremer, the US CPA administrator. He asserts that it was obvious there were not enough troops to deal with "looting on an industrial scale" and also blames a lack of cooperation between the US military and the 3,000-strong civilian administration.

Time and again people on the ground attest to the fact that it was a lack of troops on the ground that led to the complete breakdown of social order in Iraq, a breakdown which eventually morphed into civil war.

Without social order any society will fragment, which is why establishing order is the first priority of any occupying army.

I often wonder what empire Cheney and Rumsfeld were emulating when they embarked on their bizarre occupation-lite in Iraq. Certainly not the Romans or the Brits who were brutal in establishing social order. They then trained and rewarded locals who were willing to establish this order for reward, which is why the Brits were able to control India with a mere 60,000 troops.

Bearpark tells a story of American arrogance leading eventually to a complete breakdown of Iraqi society.

Mr Bearpark said British attempts to be signatories to the formation of the CPA as a joint occupying power under the Geneva convention were brushed aside by the Americans. "Throughout its entire existence, CPA was a US government department and no agreement was ever signed between the British and the Americans, because the Americans refused even to consider it."

He insists there was a window of opportunity in 2003, following the invasion in April, when the coalition had the support of the Iraqi people, but by the winter "we were losing them since we were unable to control security". By January, the people realised the situation would not improve.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Soon after, the civil war took hold and the Iraq war was lost. Of course, Bush and Blair continue to refuse to accept that the war has been lost, which is why young Americans and Brits continue to be cannon fodder for a lost cause.

Having not listened then, they will not listen now. Both of these vainglorious failures are more concerned with passing the problem on to their successors than accepting the tragedy that they have unleashed in the Middle East.

Bearpark, like so many before him, is simply pointing out that it needn't have ended in this way, had only the Americans listened.

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Tags: Iraq, Iraq war, British army, Occupation forces, Iraq coalition, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush, Blair