This programme contains some strong language and some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.
'When people look back on this conflict, I honestly believe they will see this
'as one of the defining moments of our century.
'In a week, we'll hear the final verdict on the Iraq War,
'which cost countless lives and left a country in chaos.'
It's incredibly eerie here on the streets of Basra tonight.
'I was with British troops when they invaded,
'as they fought a losing battle,
'and when they pulled out after six long years of war.
'Now, I'm going back
'with parents who lost their son, a soldier, here.'
Matthew would have thought, "You've done it now, Mum. You've done it."
'The British general who led the Desert Rats into battle
'looks back on what went wrong.'
We were inadequately prepared, both physically and mentally,
for the aftermath of the war fighting.
'Now the Iraq Inquiry will have to decide why we went to war
'and who was responsible for what happened.'
'We want justice.'
We want justice, you know, for the sake of our family,
for British soldiers who lost their lives there.
'Basra Airport in southern Iraq.
'There's little to show this was once the base
'for thousands of British troops.
'Today, it's a civilian airport
'and I'm here to meet Maureen and Roger Bacon from London.'
Morning. How are you?
- Nice to see you. - You, too. - How was your trip? Hello, Maureen.
Nice to see you.
'For 11 years, they've wanted to come to Basra, where their son,
'Matthew, a British officer, was killed.'
So that's where Matthew would have been based.
To actually find that still, the actual building
that he worked in is here, that's...
that's something else, again.
'For the Bacons, this is an alien and dangerous place.
On the roadside, there's a lot of waste and a lot of rubbish.
Barren and pretty bleak, really.
Always smiling.
'Matthew's parents hope this trip can help them
'understand why Matthew died here.'
When he left, he was shoulders back, head held high
and he was coming out here to make a better place for the Iraqis,
so I wanted to, just to see where Matthew spoke his last words
and took his last breath, just to try and make sense of it all.
- TONY BLAIR: - 'On Tuesday night, I gave the order
'for British forces to take part in military action in Iraq.
'Their mission - to remove Saddam Hussein from power
'and disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.'
'When the British forces invaded,
'they thought Saddam's huge army would put up a fight.
'I was with the Desert Rats.
'Their aim - to secure strategic bridges into Basra.'
So this is it, Al-Fayha'a Bridge.
Yep, well, it brings back a lot of memories.
It's almost 13 years ago to the day that we were here.
'I first met Graham Binns when he commanded British forces here.'
This was fighting by almost a sort of militia-style.
'Only a small hard-core of Saddam's loyalists
'took a stand on the bridge.
'They used the population as cover.
'We sat on these bridges for longer than I was expecting, really,'
and then we started conducting raids into the city centre.
CHEERING
'Saddam's militia quickly melted away
'and the British took control of southern Iraq.
'Just days later, I drove through Basra.
'I found the home of Saddam's notorious cousin,
'once the governor here.
'Nicknamed "Chemical Ali",
'he'd ordered the killing of thousands of Iraqis with poison gas.
'Families who suffered under the regime
'had now taken over his mansion.'
Thank you, Mr Blair.
You want to thank Mr Blair for bringing the army here?
- Yes, yes, good. Very good. - And many people feel that in Basra?
- ALL REPEAT: - Yes!
SHE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE
'I've come back now to Basra, back to that very same house.'
You know, that sense of gratitude to Tony Blair,
that sense of optimism that the British Army was here
and, you know, Basra could have a better future,
that was really, really strong when I was here just after the invasion.
But, sadly for the British, it didn't last long.
DOGS BARK
'Within a week of taking Basra, on night patrol,
'it was clear the British were in for a long haul.'
It's incredibly eerie here on the streets of Basra tonight.
In recent days, several state-owned banks have been looted.
'There was a power vacuum in Basra.
'Saddam's brutal Sunni regime had suppressed the Shia Muslim south.
'Now it was gone.'
Basically, what we've got is guys coming in from the slums area
into the town centre, where we are now,
and they're armed with AK-47s and basically harassing
the locals, you know, kicking front doors in.
'Five million people live in southern Iraq.
'There were never enough British troops on the ground to stop
'a breakdown of law and order.'
Everybody's stealing it from the national stores,
so we're a bit helpless to stop them at the moment.
You ask them, "Is it stolen?" They're like, "Yes, Ali Baba's."
It's natural, now that the Iraqi government have gone.
'The British Army set up their headquarters
'in Saddam's summer palace.
'Brigadier Binns was running an area almost the size of England
'with no strategic plan.'
'We really didn't understand how much risk we were taking.
'I think we'd lulled ourselves into this false sense that the war'
was over, the fighting had finished and we would
set about reconstruction with the support of the population.
That fire's still burning over on the front.
- I'm surprised they've not put that out yet. - Yes.
'British troops had to supply basic needs, like water, in a city
'whose infrastructure had been deliberately run down by Saddam.
'The soldiers wanted to win hearts and minds,
'but the population was getting restive.'
Yes. OK.
- Let me explain. The situation is very difficult. - Yes.
Firstly, with the water, you are correct.
The water engineering works aren't working. OK?
Mark Etherington was one of just a handful of British civilian
administrators sent to Iraq.
First meeting I attended, a local tribal chief said to me,
"Nothing works, everything is broken and it needs to be fixed."
And then I think, after a while, he added, "Now"!
And there were two of us at the time, I remember.
I didn't think we had a coherent plan in the longer term.
We hadn't really, as a coalition,
thought through how we were going to operate.
We were inadequately prepared both physically
and mentally for the aftermath of the war fighting.
The aftermath would keep the British bogged down for six long years.
Maureen and Roger Bacon have come to Basra to try
and understand what their son gave his life for here.
From the start, his parents knew
Matthew would be involved in the war.
His life had always been military service.
I think from age six, he decided that he was going in the Army
and it was going to be his career.
The idea of soldiering came into his head, really, and he joined the
local Army Cadet Force and it was immediately the right thing for him.
Matthew progressed through the ranks to become
a major in the Intelligence Corps.
While the Army prepared for war,
his mother joined a million people demonstrating in London.
I marched and it was something that I felt passionate about.
I wondered, "Why are we going into Iraq?"
It was just something that I couldn't work out
and didn't agree with at all.
I felt very uncomfortable about it.
I felt, "This is not right, this is not right."
Matthew just said, "Well, you must do what you want to do, Mum."
He didn't give any opinion at all,
because Matthew was a professional soldier.
Two years later, Matthew would be posted to Iraq.
He only served there for a month.
- NEWS REPORTER: - 'A British soldier is killed in southern Iraq.
'Three others are injured.'
There was this terrific knock on the door like no other knock that
I've ever heard or would ever wish to hear again.
Disbelieving that, you know...
- In shock, really. That's what it was. Complete shock. - Yes.
And we couldn't think. Couldn't think.
MILITARY TAPS
The families who lost loved ones want to know
if they were told the truth about why Britain went to war in Iraq.
A year before the invasion,
Tony Blair flew in to meet President George Bush.
Only months after 9/11, Iraq was now on the agenda.
This was part of the Blair hug-'em-close philosophy.
"We're with you on this.
"We're with you from the beginning and we'll be with you till the end."
Sir Christopher Meyer was at the Bush ranch in Texas
when the two leaders met in private.
Did Tony Blair make a secret deal with George Bush to remove
Saddam by military force?
Those two men are alone.
I suspect what Blair actually said to Bush was,
"Whatever you decide to do, George, I'm with you."
The next day, Mr Blair backed the American desire to
get rid of Saddam, their next target in the war on terror.
If necessary, the action should be military and, again,
if necessary and justified, it should involve regime change.
'It was the first occasion when I had heard Tony Blair...'
mention in public regime change in an approving way.
Removing Saddam by force without a UN resolution would be illegal.
Tony Blair said he wanted to go the UN route, but Clare Short,
who had responsibility for humanitarian relief,
didn't believe him.
I think he'd made up his mind to be with Bush,
knowing we were massaged and deceived to get us there,
when it was a manipulation of us, that is us,
the Parliament, the Cabinet,
British public opinion, American public opinion,
by people who were determined
to take military action from the beginning.
It was only as troops began to build up on Iraq's border,
two months before the war, that serious planning got underway.
But Sir Christopher had warned London the year before
the US had no plan for the aftermath.
We said, "It's a black hole. It's a black hole, and it is something that
"you, Prime Minister, need to say,
"the President needs to get moving."
And we said this at regular intervals through the year.
"It's not working on planning."
The British Government's attempts to get UN approval to tackle Saddam
meant they couldn't be seen to be gearing up for military action.
The plans for afterwards were not properly made because all
the players that should be involved weren't allowed to be involved.
Terrible.
But in London, the head of Britain's forces claims Clare Short was
preventing her crucial department from getting fully involved.
It's been said that you didn't engage with the planning
- because of your personal stance on the war. - Yeah, but that is a lie.
I mean, you know... There was a sort of tension between us
and the Ministry of Defence very late in the day,
when I think they started to realise the dangers that were coming.
- REPORTER: - 'The fall of Baghdad -
'Saddam's grip on the capital collapses.
'After three weeks of war,
'scenes of jubilation have replaced fighting and bombing.'
Days after Saddam was toppled, his ministries were burnt
and looted, while American troops stood by.
- What's been going on here? - The fuckin' war's going on.
They weren't prepared for this.
For America, it was already mission accomplished - the war was over.
- GEORGE BUSH: - 'In the battle of Iraq, the United States
'and our allies have prevailed.
'The tyrant has fallen and Iraq is free.'
Where's the Americans? Is this how Iraq wants to be?
Everybody stealing and looting from everybody?
We want security! We want peace for our country!
Britain, the junior partner in the coalition,
was tied to the only policy the Americans had -
to dismantle the whole state.
In Basra during the invasion, the coalition had bombed
the headquarters of Saddam's all-powerful Ba'ath Party.
But now they disbanded the entire Ba'ath structure
which had held the country together -
the police, the army, the civil service.
We stripped the framework of the nation by removing a regime
and we didn't replace it with anything that was...
..that promoted stability.
Another British civilian coordinator, Emma Sky,
had to deal with the breakdown of the Iraqi state.
We ended up with hospitals without any doctors,
schools without any teachers, because it didn't just
remove the top-level people, it went right the way down.
This was a centralist economy, so the factories, the dams,
the irrigation schemes, the police, the police's uniform,
their cars, you name it - we were responsible for it.
It removed the sinews of the state that held the country together.
And so without any security forces, people were fearful
and they started to form gangs, militias could flourish,
insurgent groups started up.
Tony Blair's response was to draw down British forces
within weeks of the invasion,
from 46,000 to just over a third of that.
There are people here who in years to come will look back
and will remember what you did and recognise that as the start
of their future and a life of hope and the possibility of prosperity.
Regime change didn't usher in a rosy future,
it unleashed powerful sectarian forces.
Soon the overstretched, underequipped British forces would
be caught in a disaster that would change public perception of the war.
- It says on the stone "Iraq 2003". - Yes.
"Remember."
And people do.
John Hyde's son Ben was a Red Cap,
one of six Royal Military Police
killed the month after the war was declared over.
Ben and the lads, I think, had six police stations to administer.
They were there trying to help the people.
I first met John ten years ago when he read me a bluey -
Ben's letter to be opened if he died.
"Mum and Dad...
.."if you're reading this then you'll know that I won't be coming home.
"I'm up in the stars now, looking down on you,
"making sure that you're safe."
The Red Caps died in Maysan, a Shia tribal area on the border
with Iran, the biggest Shia power in the region.
The British were now responsible for this province,
but Iran was determined to extend its influence here.
Chris Kemp commanded a company of British Paras in the area.
He is now head of the BBC's security.
He hasn't spoken publicly before about the day the Red Caps died.
I had 90 soldiers and a huge patch of land, which is
clearly not enough to bring any sort of military sense to it.
We could see things happening around us
but hadn't been able to interpret that information,
but you could sense that there was malign influence.
Iran was stirring up trouble as the British tried to disarm
the tribes, though Major Kemp didn't know it.
He called a meeting with local elders
in the town of Majar al-Kabir.
There were people in that room that had never been there before.
They were the people right at the bottom of the room
that were actually really calling the shots.
Chris Kemp says he agreed to stop searching houses
but made it clear his troops would continue to patrol the town.
So I said, "We're not having a no-go area,
"no further weapons searches, but we would be coming back."
A few days later, the Paras were confronted
by an armed crowd in the town.
They had to fight their way out.
Meanwhile, six Red Caps were at the police station,
trapped now by the mob.
They had no satellite phone to call for help.
There was no thought to take them prisoner,
disarm them or anything else - they went in there to kill them.
Ben was hit six times and fell to the ground
and the Iraqis then went into the room
and continued firing until they were dead.
What tends to get forgotten is the courage
that the lads showed that day.
They could have slaughtered a lot of people,
but that's not what the Royal Military Police do.
They're peacekeepers, they're trained negotiators.
Chris Kemp led the force sent to rescue the Paras
and discovered the Red Caps had been killed at the station.
I remember the ambulances with the legs of the soldiers.
It's a strong memory that won't ever leave me,
that loss of life on a single day.
Some of the families believe that you abandoned those men,
those young soldiers, that the Paras effectively left them to their fate.
What do you say to that?
It would be completely untrue. We wouldn't do that.
No British soldier would have done that.
But we just didn't know they were there and, in the confusion,
you would not have known they were there
unless somebody had told you they were there.
The battalion headquarters didn't know exactly where
the Red Caps were.
The inquest questioned the failure of intelligence
and lack of crucial equipment, like satellite phones.
You know, I don't know what closure means.
- And you think about Ben. - All the time.
Probably more now than I did when he was alive.
But what happened at Majar al-Kabir really shocked the British public.
They realised for the first time that far from mission accomplished,
some Iraqis, with meddling from Iran, were never
going to accept the British Army occupying their country.
THEY CHANT
With Iran's backing, the Shia militias were becoming all-powerful.
The British underestimated the growing influence
of Muqtada al-Sadr, the firebrand cleric, and his Mahdi Army.
They thought they could negotiate with him
but his militia was gearing up for a fight.
- TRANSLATION: - The British forces came to Iraq as invaders.
We considered them an army of occupation,
so we had a duty to resist.
And we were able to fight them despite our scarce resources.
Under the militias, Basra, once famous for its culture
and its tolerance, became a place of fear.
Alcohol sellers were hounded out, people disappeared,
were tortured and killed.
Middle-class educated Iraqis began to leave.
Back then I met Taroub al-Ainache and heard about her family tragedy.
Her husband, Hasan, was working for the British as they tried
to put local government in the hands of Iraqis.
He always told me,
"Basra is going to be the Venice of the Middle East."
He really had high, high hopes for Basra. He loved it.
But Hasan refused to take part in corruption,
which was now flourishing as a result of the insecurity.
I heard the shots in the house because it happened
so near to my house.
They just came at very, very short range and blew his head off.
I've come back to visit Taroub, who now lives in Jordan.
- Shall I make tea for you? - That would be lovely.
Taroub's sons and grandchildren live in England and Canada.
I go visit them every now and then.
- So your sons, your family, are all over the world now. - Yes, yes.
We'd taken some pictures of Taroub's house
and neighbourhood in Basra today.
She has never been back there - it's too dangerous
and holds too many memories.
Street is so dirty now, refuse to clean.
Ah, this is the house.
It's beautiful. It's a beautiful house.
This is the palm tree I used to water every morning.
How do you feel looking at the pictures?
Sad.
Sad, sad.
Do you think you will ever go back?
- Hopefully, yeah. - One day.
One day. But when? I don't know.
Nobody knows.
More than a million Iraqis have fled abroad as a result of the war.
Of course there is bitterness.
All Iraqis are scattered all over the world now.
And what did the British bring to Basra?
Nothing.
They came and they went and what changed?
Nothing changed.
Just Saddam Hussein was out, that's it.
'Nine months after the invasion, US forces finally caught Saddam.
'He was hiding out by the River Tigris.'
So, this is it.
This is it. This is where the... This is the Presidential suite.
- The Presidential suite? - Yeah, right there. - Was here? - Yeah.
But running Saddam to ground in his foxhole didn't stabilise Iraq.
His loyalists joined Sunni extremist groups like Al-Qaeda,
fast gaining a foothold here.
They launched brutal sectarian attacks against Shia Muslims.
The country descended into violence and anarchy.
First explosions went off amongst pilgrims gathered at...
Iraq suffers its bloodiest day since the official end of the war.
Before the war, the Prime Minister had disregarded experts
who warned of the risks of removing a dictator.
Tony Blair told the nation the real threat was Saddam's
weapons of mass destruction.
He has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical
and biological weapons which could be activated within 45 minutes.
Before the war, UN inspectors searched Iraq for the weapons.
Finding them would have justified a military invasion.
I was with them, checking out some of the locations in Tony Blair's
infamous intelligence dossier.
I'm on my way to Al Doura.
It's a vaccine laboratory which British intelligence,
in their dossier, have called a facility of concern.
'There was nothing left anywhere. The UN never found the weapons.
'They had destroyed them all a decade before,
'according to the Iraqi officials I met.'
The West still doesn't seem to believe Iraq,
there's still this feeling you're hiding something.
If we had something we would produce it.
We would be happy to produce it, to get rid of it and get done.
But if we don't - we don't - what do we do?
Back then, in New York, I met the chief UN inspector.
Hans Blix was never sure the Iraqis were telling the truth
but he was sceptical of the intelligence
provided by the British.
Frequently they simply state that "intelligence tells us this"
or "intelligence shows that". Fine, it may all be true.
But simply saying that "intelligence shows" is not evidence.
Today, Dr Blix is back home in Sweden.
He told me he warned Mr Blair a month before the war that hundreds
of inspections had failed to yield any substantial evidence of WMDs.
I shared with him then our doubts about the existence of weapons.
I said "Maybe."
But I said at the same time that, "It would be paradoxical,
"wouldn't it, if you were to invade Iraq
"with 250,000 men and find very little?"
And what was Tony Blair's response when you warned him?
Did he take it on board?
No, he sort of waved it away and said that,
"No, our intelligence and our indications are so clear."
I think this was a basic mistake.
So did the Prime Minister put a gloss on flimsy evidence
to make a false case for war?
A far-reaching VX nerve agent programme,
up to 6,500 chemical munitions,
at least 80 tonnes of mustard gas,
possibly more than ten times that amount, unquantifiable amounts...
In the crucial Commons debate on the eve of war, Mr Blair said
anything unaccounted for from a decade before must still exist.
Do you think he misrepresented the facts?
What he said did not represent the reality.
Was he lying, therefore?
I never claimed that it was in bad faith.
Many people can bring themselves to believe something
that they want to believe.
- But you think he misrepresented the facts? - Yes.
Even after they'd destroyed Saddam's military machine,
the coalition never found the elusive weapons of mass destruction,
only facilities abandoned long ago.
A year before the war,
British intelligence had told the government their knowledge
of the WMDs was sporadic and patchy,
but six months later, intelligence chiefs helped Mr Blair
compile the dossier that made the case for war.
I apologise for the fact that the intelligence we'd received
was wrong because, even though he had used chemical weapons
extensively against his own people, against others,
the programme in the form that we thought it was did not exist
in the way that we thought, so I can apologise for that.
Apologising for the intelligence being wrong is blaming
the intelligence agencies, and is a falsity
because what was known, which was very little indeed,
was then exaggerated way beyond
to give this imminent threat -
imminent threat to Britain.
I mean, that's just dishonest. There's no question about it.
The British were under mounting pressure from the Shia militias
two years on. They faced a devastating new weapon,
a roadside bomb that could penetrate British armour.
EXPLOSION
We were too thin to really take on an enemy that was becoming more
technically sophisticated.
- And where were they getting that technical expertise from? - Iran.
There was a determined campaign to embarrass the coalition.
Roger and Maureen's son, Matthew, was killed by a roadside bomb
when he was sent to Basra in 2005.
They've waited 11 years to visit the spot where he died.
More of a track.
A dirt track.
Matthew's patrol had left Basra Palace,
heading for the airbase through the notorious Shia Flats,
controlled by the militias.
I was trying to imagine the patrol travelling there,
through that traffic.
I was thinking about Matthew and the banter, you know, that the
boys were having.
People following them, watching them.
This is still a threatening and dangerous place. We can't stay long.
Just to think that it would happen in an area like this.
Just desolation. It's unbelievable.
Matthew's parents want to lay some mementos.
And next.
To lay the pebbles, one from Roger and myself, and the cross,
and the pebble from Matthew's brother,
that was really emotional.
- And to scatter the poppies. - Just put them around.
Yes.
- Just... - OK.
Very difficult to put into words.
- I just felt Matthew there. I've got one for... - 79.
They've brought poppies for each of those killed in action in Iraq.
- Men and women. - Men and women.
Soldiers put their lives on the line. You know that.
But it doesn't lessen anything.
The grief is the same.
So coming here was part of that...
Um...
Rite of passage, I suppose, in a way.
I have a sense of relief.
A relief at actually seeing the place where Matthew died.
And also...
Matthew...
..would have thought, "You've done it now, Mum. You've done it."
And it's what he would have expected me to do.
Definitely.
Matthew should never have been on that road.
He should have been in a helicopter, but it had broken down.
He had to go in a Snatch Land Rover, a lightly armoured vehicle.
He died two years after the first soldier was killed in this
type of Land Rover.
We actually saw the Land Rover on the television news.
And it was horrific. Absolutely horrific.
I mean, the Snatch Land Rovers, it's like a knife going through butter.
The year after Matthew Bacon died,
British soldiers were still being killed by roadside bombs.
As Iraq teetered on the brink of civil war, I joined the small
British detachment in Maysan, where the Red Caps had been killed.
Everyone was on high alert.
The Shia militia leader, Muqtada al-Sadr,
had just warned the British to leave.
In Amarah, the capital of the province,
I went on patrol with Captain Richard Holmes.
Seems calm enough.
Yeah. I mean, as I say, we've been here for four months
and this area especially, people have always been very welcoming.
They're very friendly.
But within minutes, everything would change.
We've just walked about 150 yards through town
and clearly our military escort is worried.
We're not able to stay here much longer.
Heading out of town, I realise something was wrong.
Tanks roared past us.
A roadside bomb had destroyed the Snatch Land Rover carrying
Captain Holmes and another soldier, Private Lee Ellis,
as they drove back to base.
They had both been killed.
27 British soldiers died in bomb attacks on their Land Rovers
in Iraq, raising serious questions about British Army equipment.
Some of the relatives say that the equipment just wasn't good enough.
It was the best that was available at the time, but the vehicles
we were using, the Snatch, were not up to the job.
They didn't have adequate levels of protection
and we were slow to replace them
and provide adequate protection to our people.
By now, dwindling British forces had retreated to a few bases in Basra.
Three years on,
reconstruction was grinding to a halt for lack of security.
The only way in from the airport was by helicopter.
We weren't driving anywhere any more.
You began to get a sense that things were not going our way.
Mark Etherington was trying to coordinate British aid.
There was still no plan.
There were countless scattered islands of effort where
people were working very hard and often bravely,
but they didn't seem knitted together in any way.
One didn't sense that all of this amounted to a strategy.
In the Shia Flats, just a few hundred yards from where Matthew
Bacon died, there's a sad reminder of what the British tried
and failed to achieve in Basra.
They built three huge water towers and spent £10 million trying
to provide clean water for half a million people.
- TRANSLATION: - A British company came to work on the project here.
It was meant to supply water for this area.
We didn't have drinking water.
It was salty, full of dirt and bacteria.
But then later, the project was abandoned.
Eventually, the towers were handed over to the Iraqis
but, to this day, the project hasn't been connected
and people still don't have clean water.
Well, this was meant to be a showpiece,
to show that the British could actually improve
the infrastructure of Basra.
But the failure to secure the city
meant that this place just couldn't be maintained.
It never actually worked and, in the end,
it turned out to just be a white elephant.
Four years after the invasion,
the British were hunkered down in their main base at the airport.
I've come back with Graham Binns to what's left of the airbase today.
Well, I mean, it's a trip down memory lane.
This was the main British garrison before we left.
It's changed an awful lot.
Most of the infrastructure's been stripped out.
The commander who had easily taken Basra came back four
years on to a very different challenge.
So the whole place was just covered in these things, which are just
tea walls, made out of concrete, that protect buildings and people.
GUNFIRE
I was on the airbase then, as the British battled a constant
barrage of mortars from the militias.
At its height, there were up to 30 different attacks a day.
Each one could have been up to a dozen rockets coming in.
I lived at the bottom of that tower
and I always believed that that tower was an aiming mark.
It was now that Tony Blair made his farewell visit to Basra,
still justifying the Iraq War.
There's been terrorist acts in Morocco, in Algeria,
in Pakistan, in Saudi Arabia. Essentially, everywhere.
This threat is on the march and we are here on the frontline
trying to defend ourselves and our way of life against it.
Mr Blair insisted Iraqi forces would soon be
capable of taking control, but he couldn't actually leave the airbase.
EXPLOSION
- TRANSLATION: - We showed Basra Airport,
the location where the British Prime Minister was visiting.
We struck with more than 300 Grad missiles.
We hoped we could kill Tony Blair.
The Prime Minister, who had taken us to war in Iraq, now stepped down.
Mr Blair declined our request for an interview.
He told us he would make a full statement
when the Iraq Inquiry reports.
But he had this to say recently on American television.
I can also apologise, by the way,
for some of the mistakes in planning and certainly our mistake
in our understanding of what would happen once you removed the regime.
But I find it hard to apologise for removing Saddam.
Mr Blair claimed removing Saddam
would make the world a safer place post-9/11.
I need you to help me, Mr Blair, because...
Instead, there's been hostage taking, beheadings,
suicide attacks in London.
We are at war and I'm a soldier.
Now you too will taste the reality of this situation.
The Iraq War has fuelled extremism and instability across the region.
This British man has to pay the price.
The so-called Islamic State emerged from the chaos of Iraq.
A magnet for jihadis, they're now attacking Europe.
Yet intelligence chiefs had secretly warned before the Iraq invasion
the threat from terrorism would be heightened by military action.
There is so much tinder in the region, the slightest spark sets
off a conflagration, so we don't know where this is going to end.
But look at Iraq today, it's a failed state.
Look at Syria, it's a failed state.
A lot of this derives from the fact that, on the basis of faulty
intelligence, the US and the UK went to war in 2003.
Roger and Maureen Bacon are visiting an Iraqi family whose lives
have also been devastated by the war here.
- I'm very sorry. - It is a real tragedy.
Our sons are victims of an unjust war.
Nibras was just 22.
One of five policemen killed on a checkpoint by Islamist
militants after the British left Iraq.
From one mother to another mother, I'm very sorry.
I understand how you feel and I see your picture of your son
and that's the picture of my son, too.
So I understand your pain.
- Cos we live it every day... Yes. Every day. - Yes.
We're very sorry that we left Basra in the state that we did.
We wish that it was a better place.
GUNFIRE
OK, the scenario is that you have stopped a vehicle...
In the last years the British spent in Basra, I saw their big
push to train up local police and security forces.
They wanted to hand over
responsibility for security to the Iraqis as soon as possible.
Today, Basra's police chief, Abdel Karim Al-Ameri,
is not short of manpower but that is part of the problem.
- TRANSLATION: - If you look at the police in Basra,
we have around 29,000. This is an insane number.
I am sure this doesn't happen in Britain, right?
Though the British spent millions training the police,
the emphasis was on quantity, not quality.
- TRANSLATION: - People applied who weren't fit to work in the police.
Some were thieves, murderers, wanted men.
But they gave them ID cards and weapons,
a government licence to start looting.
And now, in most of the gangs we catch, we find policemen.
This road outside Basra, near the Iranian border,
became kidnap central after the invasion.
It is only now the police chief's set up a ring of checkpoints,
manned by more professional forces, that kidnaps dropped substantially.
The British spent a lot of money and time here, training the police.
- Did it do any good? - No, just the opposite.
If the British had built a police force using a more scientific
approach, we wouldn't have had these problems.
Building up Iraqi security forces meant Britain could
move troops and equipment to fight in Afghanistan,
now seen as the priority.
Meanwhile, America was reinforcing Iraq with a massive
surge of soldiers.
Emma Sky was now political adviser to the head of US forces.
With the Americans like, "We're coming back
"and we are going to make this work."
With Basra, there became a sense that the Brits calculated that
Iraq was lost, that Afghanistan was still saveable,
that they would get out of Iraq and go to Afghanistan.
We had lost the strategic will to endure.
We were measuring success by the rate at which
we could draw down and move people to Afghanistan.
Actually, what happened is that we resourced
neither particularly well.
We went into Afghanistan with too little
and we drew too much away from here too quickly.
EXPLOSIONS
By now, the Shia militias were determined to push the small
British force out of the city.
Here it goes again.
EXPLOSIONS
SOLDIERS EXCLAIM
Welcome to Basra Palace.
Soldiers filmed themselves under siege at the Palace,
the British headquarters inside the city.
British troops were dying in firefights to keep supply
lines open between the airbase and the Palace.
THEY SHOUT
Iranian mortar crews reinforced the militias.
Mate, that was close, wasn't it? I'm shaking.
Incoming!
EXPLOSIONS SOLDIERS SHOUT
The Army was about to do a secret deal with the very people
killing our soldiers.
GUNSHOTS
I was there and saw the celebratory shooting
as militia prisoners were released from British custody.
You did do a deal with them.
Well, I am not going to discuss the nature of those talks.
'At the time, the man doing the deal, Graham Binns,
'wasn't keen to talk about it.
'But now it is clear what happened.'
We started talking to the leadership
and we reached a deal for the release of prisoners,
providing the attacks against us stopped.
Although, they were part of an organisation
that had killed British soldiers.
That, I think, is just one of the awkward facts of conflict,
that we sometimes just brush under the table.
You have to talk... Normally to resolve a conflict,
you have to talk to the opposition.
And so the British Army withdrew from Basra, to the
airbase outside the city.
They would finally leave southern Iraq six years after the invasion.
So was it all worth it?
What does the man who led the troops into Basra think of the city today?
Well, it is still dirty, dusty and hot. So some things don't change.
But what strikes me is that markets are busy
and there are a lot of new cars on the street.
What I see here now makes me more optimistic.
I don't think we did too much harm.
We ourselves didn't cause overwhelming damage
when we took the city.
But did the British achieve anything after that?
We were simply not prepared
for supporting the reconstruction of a city this size.
Do you think it was foolish to think we could?
I think we probably over-promised
and under-delivered in that regard, yes.
On the surface, things in Basra are improving, but underneath,
democracy is still fragile, corruption is rife.
The famous canals are choked with rubbish
and there are frequent power cuts.
I wondered how things were now in the mansion of Saddam's cousin,
Chemical Ali, 13 years after I first came here.
Assalamu alaikum.
Families are still squatting here. 20 people living in two rooms.
Security remains the key to everything here.
Today, Basra Palace is still home to military forces
but now it is Shia militias who are based here.
Ironically, the very people who forced the British out are an
essential part of the Iraqi army,
fighting the so-called Islamic State.
It looks a bit neglected now, doesn't it?
Well, it, it does, actually.
It is rundown, it is
occupied by various elements of the Iraqi military and security forces.
Yes. And, erm, a few sheep here.
- Well, somebody's making good use of the land. - Yes!
So what is the General's final verdict on Britain's
war in Iraq?
I think it was entirely the right thing to
do at the time, to remove the regime.
I just don't think we resourced it and had a plan that was...
to replace it with something else.
No-one can deny the tragedy of this war, which cost Iraq at least
a quarter of a million dead,
two million displaced and homeless.
During the invasion,
I first came face to face with the human cost of this war
at the house of Abed Hassan Hamoodi.
It was hit by a coalition bomb targeting the building behind.
Before I leave Iraq, I really want to see this place again.
The coalition mistakenly thought Chemical Ali
was at the neighbouring house.
Well, it is really strange being back in this bedroom.
It looks tidy now and 13 years ago, when I was here,
it was knee-deep in debris.
This is where everybody was sleeping that night and the
blast was right next door and this is the room that took the hit.
It feels... It is abandoned now and it is really sad.
Three generations of the Hamoodi family were sheltering
here from the war. Ten people were killed.
I managed, luckily, to save the life of my daughter with her two
sons, four years and six months.
The third one was killed with his grandmum.
Dina Hamoodi lost her young son.
What will your family do now?
What will the women do?
Nothing. Just crying. We don't have anything to do.
Just crying.
Just crying. Just nothing.
Abed Hassan, Dina and the family now live in England.
They still gather every year, on the anniversary of the bombing.
Every morning I look at the picture and I cry for a while.
The tragedy is never forgotten. It is with me day and night.
Something I will never forget. Honest to God.
Do you think your family will ever recover from what happened?
I don't think so. I don't think so.
It is difficult.
And it is getting more difficult with time.
They say sometimes time is a solution.
But myself, I think with time it is getting more complicated.
When the Hamoodis left Iraq, they shut up the house in Basra.
They were once pillars of their community.
Dr Akram goes back to help in the hospital when he can.
The people have now started to say that they are better
lived in Saddam's days rather than these days.
- Better off under Saddam? - Yes, that is what they feel.
- Who do you blame for what happened in Iraq? - Blair and Bush.
Those two people that are responsible for everything
that happened to the British people and to Iraqi people,
and those people,
they should be taken to court, court of law and they should be judged.
What do you feel about Tony Blair
- and his responsibility for what happened in Iraq? - We want justice.
We want justice, you know, for the sake of our family,
for British soldiers who lost their lives there.
He is responsible for what happened. He and Mr Bush.
When I first came here,
Saddam's yacht was still moored on the Shatt al-Arab waterway.
Now it is barely visible.
Well, there isn't any trace of Saddam Hussein left here
in Basra, except this rusting hulk of his old yacht in the water.
But, you know, the British have hardly left any trace here either.
It could well be that their only lasting legacy is that they
did remove Saddam.
The Iraq Inquiry has promised to tell us
the lessons that should be learned.
But for some of those involved, they are already plain to see.
The lessons are these -
don't interfere in other people's civil wars, don't try
and nation-build, it is a fool's errand,
and don't do regime change
unless you are utterly clear what the consequences are likely to be.
I think Blair had the feeling that this was an evil regime
and that it was the moral thing to do away with it.
I don't think that is an evil thought
but I think it was a presumptuous
thought that the UK and the US alone should do that.
They were all his decisions.
He thought it was the right thing to do.
He has got it on his conscience for as long as he is alive
and it will remain his legacy in the history books, I'm afraid.
Clare Short resigned from Tony Blair's government,
her political career cut short by Iraq.
I did try but I still feel terrible about it.
Terrible.
It sort of ruined the culmination of my life in politics, really.
Because it is politics at its worst.
And it has caused untold destruction for the people of Iraq
and the wider region.
Has coming to Basra helped Roger
and Maureen come to terms with Matthew's death?
I would like to think that he lost his life in a worthwhile cause.
But I can't. I can't do that.
As a country, as a people, we would have no wish to have invaded Iraq.
We were carried into it and I can't emphasise enough how much that
I feel this was entirely wrong, that it was a complete deception.
He did lose his life for Queen and country.
And that is what we have to live with for the rest of our lives,
every day.
Should never, ever have invaded Iraq. Never.
Never. No life lost was worth it. At all. None.
Whatever the verdict of the Iraq Inquiry,
the true scale of the damage done to this country, the region
and Britain's reputation, only history can judge.