Greg Mills

God, history and countering insurgency

British troops into Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003. His implication was clear: it is too soon to deliver a verdict on the invasion. Such events are assessed in the grand sweep of eras and centuries, long after the main players have left the stage. History and God: together they form a powerful elixir, inoculating leaders against present-day judgements that challenge their gravest decision, namely to send men and women to war. Or so the Prime Minister might have wished. History’s verdict is crystallizing faster than anyone expected – and it bears little resemblance to the dreamy pre-war Iraqi forecasts of Whitehall and Washington. Even with the removal of Saddam and the discernible improvements to the lives of many ordinary Iraqis, the war is increasingly seen in the West – and elsewhere, overwhelmingly – as a moral and strategic failure. After years of brutal violence, tremorous sectarian fault-lines, cases of torture and abuse by coalition forces, can history’s verdict on the Iraq War still be in any doubt? Yes, but not for long. The casus belli may have disintegrated in the fruitless post-war search for weapons of mass destruction, but if the plan to occupy and transform the country had proved successful and a unified Iraq was progressing more or less Defense & Security Analysis Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 101–106, March 2007

Denuclearizing a Regime: What South Africa's Nuclear Rollback Might Tell Us About Iran

ISSN 1475-1798 print; 1475-1801 online/06/030329-07

ARMSCOR: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Embargo Disimplemented: South Africas Military Industry. By S. Landgren. Oxford University Press for SIPRI, New York (1989), ISBN 0–19–829127–2, £30.00 (

Disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration and local ownership in the Great Lakes: the experience of Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo

65.00) ARMSCOR: South Africas Arms Merchant. By J. P. McWiixiams. Brasseys Defence Publishers, London (1989), ISBN 0–08–036709–7, £25.00 (

New Security Paradigms

40.00)