The author is a British Army officer currently serving in Iraq. This post is written in response to the comments on the author's original post here.

I'd like to use this post to respond to the comments made on previous post about nation building and also to examine in greater detail a point made previously about the utility of force which I feel has still not sunk in deeply enough in the minds of commentators and policy makers. I'll begin by summarising what I believe is the gist of the points made; firstly the moral imperative to intervene made by Simon and Adam, secondly the questionable legitimacy of those actions - a point made by both Rob and Laurent, and finally a proposal by Laurent that military forces should police safe areas where a process of reconstruction could begin.

I found it interesting that despite cautioning readers on this very issue, all the comments made - with the exception of Laurent's suggestion - focussed on the morality and legality of the use of force, rather than its utility. Yet I would argue that it is exactly that lack of discussion that has lead us to the problems we face in Iraq. Pre-war arguments focussed exclusively on the morality and legality of the war, and comparatively little thought was spared as to whether the instruments of regime change were actually suitable for the task of nation building. To quote from General Smith's book, whose title I have borrowed for this post:

The public international outcry and discourse in the lead up to Op Iraqi Freedom in March 2003, and the invasion of Iraq by the US led coalition, reflected in many ways the idea that the morality and legality of force defined its utility; if it was moral and legal then the war would successful, if not the inverse would be true. Yet it cannot be so; whilst the application of force for immoral reasons cannot be counternanced, it is also an insufficient manner in which to understand a core reality: we the people need force as a basic element in our lives for two overarching purposes: defence and security.

We are now paying the price for looking at military intervention through a set of values and ideas which are insufficient to truly understand or respond effectively to the challenges we face in successfully completing the international tasks we set ourselves, be that the war on terror or humanitarian intervention. It is not sufficient, I contend, merely to debate those issues and their solutions through morality and legality - all the more so since the societies which we operate in often do not share any of our presuppositions about what those words mean. Although those discussions must take place, they have to be joined by a serious examination of the instruments and methods with which we intend to solve those problems, and their utility. This is where a serious debate about the utility of force in solving problems like terrorism, genocide, domestic security etc. and therefore a debate on the future of our Armed Forces, belongs. Furthermore, it needs to take place urgently before we embark on more ill-judged international activities. 

To begin, I think we have to return to the obvious: The Armed Forces' core mission is to defend the territorial integrity of the UK and its preferred method is to employ equipment and soldiers which are designed and trained to 'close with and destroy the enemy'. We have to remind ourselves that anything else is a bonus, and that the Armed Forces have had, and continue to have, a lot of utility in fulfilling this mission during the 20th and 21st centuries. We must also constantly remind ourselves that the further we stray from that core mission, the less utility our Armed Forces have, and the more likely they are to fail. I contend that the failure of those missions in practical and utilitarian terms also calls into question their humanitarian and moral value. I will use two examples bought up by commentators and one of my own to illustrate the point, the first being the Bosnian War, the second Rwanda and the third example of Iraq. 

Early in the Yugoslavian Civil War the Bosnian Government called on the United Nations to help defend its borders against aggressive ethnic cleansing by Serbian forces. This constituted the moral and legal imperative to act, yet as we know insufficient practical consideration of the mission meant that UN forces lacked utility in the following ways: Their mandate, rules of engagement, equipment and numbers were all insufficient to deter the Bosnian Serb forces from carrying out atrocities. The material failure of UN mission led to its moral and legal questionablity in situations like the massacre at Scebrenica. As we know, the Bosnian Serbs were able to continue their policy of aggression largely undeterred until the late summer and autumn of 1995 when the Croatian Army, which had been armed, equipped and trained by Western advisers, attacked and defeated Bosnian Serb forces with Western air support. I think two points can be taken from this: Firstly, it is instructive to see that the Bosnian Serb leadership responded to the defeat of their forces in the field rather than to solutions put forward on the basis of legality such as the Vance-Owen plan of two years previously. Secondly, the use of proxy armies in areas where the terrain is unsuitable for large scale armoured operations with air support (the sort of wars for which Western armies are still trained) is a viable practical option as Afghanistan was later to prove further. 

In Rwanda there was a similar moral and legal imperative, but no intervention. Western leaders have been slated for this. But it is blatantly clear from Bosnia and subsequent interventions that unless there is clear a practical methodology through rules of engagement and scale of deployment, a Western force merely deployed on the basis of legality and morality does not automatically have any practical utility, and therefore it is not long before its moral and legal standing are similarly undermined. To restore order to Rwanda would have required resolute protection of refugee camps and Tutsis who had not yet fled the fighting. To fulfill this task in a credible manner implies a shoot to kill policy by Western forces not just in self defence but also in defence of the lives and property of all civilians, which in turn implies the use of large numbers of armoured vehicles, aircraft and heavy weapons for mobility, protection and deterrence. And so the snowball rolls on. I am by no means an expert, but I would conservatively estimate that a force of 50,000+ (approx. two divisions) might have able to control the violence. Bear in mind that a force of 150,000+ is currently unable to control all but the most serious violence in Iraq, and that a force of 25,000 + was able to offer no effective resistance to the Bosnian Serbs' criminal activities.

The failure of the second stage of our mission in Iraq (to create the conditions where peace, democracy and prosperity can flourish under the guardianship of domestic Iraqi forces) has had widespread consequences. I will focus on just a few. It can be seen that a lack of practical planning and consideration of the use of coalition forces in the post war scenario led initially to the breakdown of civil order from which the insurgency immensely benefitted. It was obvious that American soldiers had no idea about how to keep civil order or re-build civil society - yet they were charged with exactly that task. In the south the British have fared better - for a while - until too much time has passed and the atmosphere of consent built on the back of liberation and the promise of a better life has slowly evaporated. The lack of utility of the Coalition forces forces for this task leads to the practical failure to keep law and order, which feeds into a moral and legal failure as Iraqi civilians are kidnapped, murdered and tortured by armed gangs. But this is not the end of it. It can be seen from historical example after historical example, from Napoleon in Spain, through World War Two and Vietnam, that where an occupying force is routinely assaulted by guerrillas, those forces fall back on steadily more brutal methods to control the situation - and so we come to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners and detainees, the worst moral and legal failure of the invasion, which casts much of the moral superiority of Western nations in the fight against terror into doubt. 

To justify our current policy and armed humanitarian interventions we have two rather self-satisfying myths: Firstly, the idea that our soldiers can use their skills to directly rebuild nations. This may be true in a limited and short term sense, but in the long term the only people who can rebuild nations are the citizens of those countries themselves. They do deserve our help, not from soldiers who can't or don't know how to help them anyway, but from civilians. Secondly, that even if soldiers turn out to be not much good at rebuilding, they are necessary to create the security and stability from which all else follows. This sadly is also a mirage. Our soldiers cannot keep order in Iraq, they cannot keep order in Afghanistan, and order only returned to Bosnia after the local protagonists fought, defeated each other in the field, and thereby came to realise that outright military victory was no longer feasible. Once again, the only people who can truly keep order in a country are the citizens of that country themselves, when they come to realise that peace is the most desirable political outcome. We may be of some assistance in helping them come to that conclusion, but we cannot impose it before they themselves arrive at that standpoint. To accept this requires some humility - a quality as much absent from the pop star lovie fringe as it is from American neocons, who are the odd bedfellows of an interventionist foreign policy. 

So we return to civil society, which ultimately bears the cost and sets the parameters of these missions. We, (you!) have to ask yourselves the question that when all is said and done, are you prepared to see your will effectively carried out in other parts of the globe? My view is that if you debate these issues solely in terms of legality and morality, but refuse to grasp the nettle of utility, you will end up achieving neither aim. From my perspective the lesson of Bosnia, Rwanda and now Iraq is that forces which lack sufficient utility to discharge their mission ultimately compromise their legal and moral standing too. It is because of this that we have to re-think the ethos and direction of our foreign policy. It seems that we want to be interventionist humanitarians, but have insufficiently considered our methodology and the extent of the resources required. This has badly compromised the utility of the forces at our disposal, and ultimately our own moral high ground.