The Changing Of The Guard by Simon Akam is an uncomfortable read...via The Daily Mail

 via DM

There is little doubt that ultimately the British military failed badly in Iraq by ceding control of Basra, in 2007, to the sectarian Shia militias that we had hitherto been fighting. 

It took an operation – ‘Charge of the Knights’ – by the poorly regarded Iraqi security forces and their US advisers, in the spring of 2008, to regain control of the city. This was the nadir, but there had been some successes earlier in the campaign, political rather than military, before the population began to realise that we simply didn’t have the resources or the will for the amount of reconstruction that the infrastructure and civil society of southern Iraq required.

Here