All the Troubles in the World

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Thursday March 13 2008

The leader below used the phrase "Up to 85,000 Iraqi deaths ..." referring to the consequences of the invasion of Iraq. We should have said that this was the upper figure published by the Iraq Body Count at the time and we should have explained that Iraq Body Count publishes a tally of violent deaths recorded in media reports since the invasion. Other organizations, using different methods - including a 2006 survey of Iraqi households, which examined mortality trends - have produced much higher estimates, although each (estimate) is subject to dispute.

Victory has been declared before in Iraq. Notoriously, George Bush landed on the deck of an aircraft carrier six weeks after the opening air strike on Baghdad and announced the end of major combat operations. Behind him, a banner declared "Mission Accomplished". That was in May 2003. Up to 85,000 Iraqi deaths, nearly 4,000 US deaths, and 174 British deaths later, Iraq's national security adviser Dr Mowaffak al-Rubaie was at it again. He said yesterday that Britain's handover of Basra to Iraqi forces was a historic day that marked a victory for Iraq.

Statistics, for long so damning about our involvement in Iraq, are back in fashion. Last week Gordon Brown found a 90% fall in violence in Basra over the past few months. Civilian deaths are reported to be down 60% across Iraq and 75% in Baghdad, since the US military surge in February. Fatality trends remain at their lowest level since the summer.

All of this has bred optimism, not least in Dr al-Rubaie who declared recently in Bahrain: "We are out of the woods. There is a new sense of belonging in Iraq." While no one wants the mayhem in Iraq to continue a day longer, simply because it confirms our opposition to the decision to invade, it is worth pausing before accepting wholesale the notion that the country is turning a corner.

First to Basra, where David Milliband, the foreign secretary, acknowledged Britain was not handing over a "land of milk and honey" to local forces. Or as a British army major put it, we never pretended we were going to hand over a state that resembled Surrey. Both support the view that the British occupation did not make life for Basrawis worse. Major-General Jalil Khalaf, Basra's new police commander, disagrees in an interview today in the Guardian. He said that the British did not foresee the problem of the "double loyalty" of many of the recruits in the Iraqi security forces which they were training. The result is that Britain's departing forces have left him with "militia ... gangsters ... and all the troubles in the world."

Our own reporting from Basra in May this year confirms it. So does Marie Colvin's reporting in the Sunday Times. Whether we judge it by the number of women killed in the past six months for "un-Islamic behavior" or by the city's 28 militias who are better armed than the major-general's men, Basra is a mess. Surrey it is not. British forces have staged a retreat, but it is hard to conclude they have done anything other than extricate themselves from a tribal quagmire they do not fully understand.

There has been an improvement in security in large parts of central and northern Iraq, although how irreversible the decline in the insurgency is, remains as yet unproven. More than 260 Iraqis have been killed so far this month, showing that if the violence can be turned off, it can just as easily be turned on again. US attempts to undermine the insurgency by arming Sunni militias in the north and west of Baghdad have helped counter the al-Qaida campaign. But no one should see in this stand-off a victory.

It is not difficult to foresee the future regrouping of armed forces in Iraq or future targets for them. The major oil companies are lining up for contracts to exploit the world's third largest oil reserves. The government of Nouri al-Maliki is poised to award contracts for existing oilfields, as it is unable to get a national oil law though parliament. A substantial US military presence will be left behind to protect a vital US national interest. To talk of peace, reconciliation and the Iraqi government's determination to rid the land of foreign troops in these circumstances is stretching it. We should stop talking about who won and who lost in Iraq. We should stop imagining it will become a pro-western democracy. We should start addressing ourselves to Iraq as it really is. Not least because we share a major responsibility for it.