A bittersweet birthday

On 20 March, the Iraq conflict reaches its third anniversary. Con Coughlin defends the decision to invade, explores the impact of Blair on Bush’s second term — and reveals what Condoleezza Rice thinks of David Cameron

Squabbling generals, political score-settling and a country reportedly on the brink of civil war. The third anniversary of the onset of Operation Iraqi Freedom this week — which coincides with kidnappings and explosions in Gaza and the West Bank — hardly seems a cause for celebration.

The painful and challenging task of rebuilding Iraq after 35 years of Baathist tyranny is far from complete, but that must now take second place to the increasingly bitter battle that is being waged over history’s judgment: whether the war was justified in the first place, and whether postwar Iraq could have been handled better.

The old adage that the victor wins the right to set the historical record to his advantage is becoming something of an obsession for those who participated in the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein’s despotism. Take the military campaign. No less an authority on warfare than the peerless Sir John Keegan has concluded that the military campaign to overthrow Saddam’s regime, which began on 20 March 2003, was a brilliant success, achieving all of its stated military objectives within the space of just 21 days.

And yet now we are told that the US-led coalition was so riven with arguments and disputes about how to prosecute the war that General Tommy Franks, the commander of the US-led invading force, nearly fired one of his leading generals within the first week of hostilities commencing.

This particular dispute was over how the Coalition should deal with the thousands of Fedayeen paramilitary fighters whom the invading army encountered as it launched its blitzkrieg on Saddam’s regime. General William ‘Scott’ Wallace, who was leading the army troops towards Baghdad, wanted to delay the advance to suppress the Fedayeen threat in the rear.