How the top brass let down our troops

In his memoirs, Jackson describes how he opposed the disastrous US decision to disband the Iraqi army, argued for more troops to maintain order, and doubted Tony Blair's WMD dossier.

Thank you, General. Right on all counts. But wouldn't it have been better for your soldiers, if not perhaps for your book sales, if you had said even some of this publicly at the time? You know what, you might even have stopped it happening, this war which has harmed more than anything else the Army you served all your life.

By mordant coincidence, on the very day you finally gave us your views, your troops withdrew from central Basra. The departure, under cover of darkness and with not a single independent witness allowed, was the penultimate stage in a historic and ignominious event, the first time in two generations that the British Army has been defeated.

And even more ironically, as Britain flees, the Americans, of whom Jackson is so critical, seem more and more likely not to follow. They didn't give up; they changed tactics. And there are tentative signs that their "surge" is working.

After I started covering the British military, 12 years ago, I became increasingly sure that ministers were in denial over the forces' resource shortages, shoddy equipment and overwork, and convinced there would eventually be a reckoning.

The brass were not in denial, but none would speak up. And then the reckoning came, in Iraq, and it was every bit as bad as we'd feared.

Dozens killed, sometimes because of decades-old equipment failings that never got fixed. Hundreds wounded, many of them totally failed by a military medical system we'd known was inadequate for years. Pay, compensation and housing which told the troops they were worthless. Thousands forced to buy their own kit or fight without. The Army tarnished by abuse scandals, often because teenage soldiers were pitched into situations they should never have been asked to cope with.

And above all, of course, the knowledge now that after the years in which we'd just about got away with stretching the green line so thin, we didn't get away with it in Basra. We didn't have enough men.

The main blame for all this lies with ministers. But Jackson and the brass let it happen. Even if he understandably felt unable to challenge government policy, Jackson could have spoken publicly against the kit shortages, the medical horrors. After Kosovo, he had the protection of a national profile.

He didn't use it. One strand in the disaster of Iraq is the dozens of senior people across the British state who failed to voice their doubts until writing their memoirs.

Some of them, like Jackson, had been notably brave and aggressive field soldiers. If only they'd shown the same firmness when they got into command.