Our departure from Iraq ends a dismal period in our military history

‘The past is the past. It is no longer important,’ says Brigadier Billal Saleh Shukur, commander of Iraq’s 21st army brigade now occupying a part of Basra. We have met on a warm March day at the airbase outside the city, at the start of a five-a-side football tournament between teams drawn from the Iraqi and British forces. I had expressed my profound regret that the American-British Coalition, which rightly reveres every one of its own casualties, has always refused to count how many Iraqi citizens have been killed in six years of violence; and indeed has invested considerable effort in discrediting any human rights organisation that estimated the death toll. Somehow the Coalition came to treat Iraqis, the people we claimed to be liberating, as the enemy, or a group deserving no respect, whose deaths were not worth noting.

All things considered, the Brigadier’s attitude is extraordinarily magnanimous. It is explained, perhaps, by the surge in confidence throughout the Iraqi forces since Operation Charge of the Knights, launched just one year ago.