Iraq War: 'we have to face the truth and admit we failed'

Andrew Gilligan, who reported from Baghdad throughout the invasion of Iraq, highlights the failures of the British military as well as those of the politicians.

British forces transfer authority over Basra to the Americans in 2009 Photo: AFP/GETTY

By Andrew Gilligan

10:00PM GMT 09 Mar 2013

On the last day of Britain’s combat mission to Iraq, 30 April 2009, we lowered the flag with characteristic verve and style. In the morning, at our base in Basra, there was a deeply affecting service in honour of our military dead. It took 29 minutes to read out all the names.

In the afternoon came a more upbeat ceremony. Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup, chief of the defence staff, said British forces had made an “outstanding contribution to the transition of Iraq.” They pulled out, he said, with “their reputation intact.”

Brigadier Tom Beckett, commander of 20th Armoured Brigade, the British formation, said: “We leave knowing we have done our job, and done it well. We leave with our heads held high.”

Gordon Brown, the prime minister (though sadly too busy to make it down himself) had earlier said that British troops remained “the best in the world” and had made Iraq “a success story”. The leaders’ very need, of course, to say such things showed that they were no longer quite true.

The Basra event was telling in one other way. Newspapers and broadcasters had known about it for some time, but were strictly forbidden from even mentioning that it would take place until afterwards. If the victory ceremony has to be kept secret on security grounds, what does that tell you about the victory? 

Iraq was a huge blow to the moral and international standing of this country. It changed, probably permanently, the relationship between the people of Britain and their leaders. I, for one, can never see our government – or our feeble democratic institutions, which did so little to prevent the disaster – in quite the same light again.

But, less widely understood, Iraq was also a military humiliation for the UK. In the debacle that was the war, and above all the occupation which followed, one group of people – Britain’s military leadership — got off far too lightly. And because we never faced up to this, the humiliation continues, right now, in Afghanistan and in Whitehall. One cherished part of the country’s self-image – the power and reputation of our armed forces — is now at serious risk.

For years, the top brass has been essentially exempt from the kind of criticism dished out to other public-sector leaders. All the failings of Iraq and Afghanistan are blamed on conniving politicians or cheese-paring bureaucrats. But evidence from those conflicts shows some of our generals, admirals and air marshals to be rather too much like, say, NHS managers for comfort.

Iraq’s greatest disaster was not the deceit beforehand, or the brief phase of “major combat operations” which began 10 years ago next week. It was the occupation which followed. That was when the vast majority of victims — perhaps 190,000 of them – died. If the occupation had gone better, the politicians’ lies would have been forgiven by now. And it was during the occupation that Britain’s brass fell down on the job.

The key evidence is hundreds of pages of official interviews, conducted by the Army itself with those in charge of the operation. A full set of classified transcripts, leaked to The Sunday Telegraph in 2009, painted a disturbing picture of complacency and misjudgment at senior levels.

Major-General Graeme Lamb, commander of 3 Division in the first months of the occupation, told his interlocutors: “It is easy to become fixated by the enemy. Securing military victory over the enemy is probably not a reality.”

Instead, Lamb favoured “soft effects,” such as improving the lives of the local people, which “really wasn’t that difficult and didn’t require that many experts. Once you knew what you needed to do, you then dispatched the nearest captain with the 'find me 100 trucks’ order and it all worked.”

With apologies to Lamb — who went on to high command in Afghanistan — the enemy surely was quite important. And sending out a captain with a hundred trucks did not “all work”. Basra’s infrastructure remained in ruins, partly because there were not “that many experts” — indeed any at all – and because security was never satisfactorily tackled by the British.

Instead, the British preferred to make deals with the enemy, the Iranian-backed Mahdi Army militia commanded by Muqtada Sadr. In the classified interviews, Major-General Andrew Stewart, the overall British commander, described how he “evaded” and “refused” American orders to confront Sadr, saying: “I was trying to achieve the same result through different means – trying to neutralise Sadr through the use of local Iraqis and succeeding.”

He did not succeed. Sadr was not a solution to the insecurity, but its key source. By 2006, Basra was in anarchy. By the following year, the policy of negotiation had led Britain to what was essentially a surrender. To the intense frustration of many British officers, we secretly signed a deal that we would not enter Basra in return for a promise that Sadr’s forces would stop attacking us.

It kept the body count down, which was all that mattered in London. But it also abandoned Basra to the Mahdi Army, who swaggered through the streets closing down video shops and enforcing headscarves on women.

The tragedy — as many of the classified interviewees recognised – was that Britain’s part of Iraq, the Shia south, was not like the centre of the country. Brutalised by Saddam, Iraqi Shias supported the invasion and might have been prepared to back the occupation. But Britain’s failure to improve infrastructure and security alienated them.

It is true that, by the time we left, the situation in Basra had dramatically improved. But that was due to an Iraqi- and US-led military offensive, Charge of the Knights, in which we took virtually no part.

Constrained by their surrender agreement, the British, theoretical guardians of Basra, stayed in their secure base on the outskirts until the closing moments, as the Iraqis and Americans drove the Mahdi Army out of town. By that stage, such was both nations’ contempt for Britain that they didn’t even tell us they were coming until the last minute.

Of course, you could say that without enough troops, and without enough political commitment, the British Army made the only choice it could. That is one of the reasons why Mr Blair’s deceits beforehand ended up mattering so much: because he could not admit he was planning a war, the forces could not prepare properly for either it or the aftermath. And afterwards, public disgust at the lies sapped will to resource the occupation.

As it happens, the military leadership was culpable there, too. In the run-up to the war, top-level figures in the defence establishment privately told journalists, including me, of their scepticism that Saddam was a serious threat. None was ever prepared to go on the record. Only in their memoirs — or at the Chilcot inquiry, when a stampede of brass wore out the carpets to dump on Blair – did the public learn of these brave warriors’ doubts.

Nor, with one or two exceptions, did they speak out against the years of disastrous procurement and kit that contributed to Britain’s Basra reckoning. Some soldiers only had five rounds of ammunition. The very first British casualty of the war, Sergeant Steven Roberts, died because his unit didn’t have enough body armour.

^{Sergeant Steven Roberts from Bradford, West Yorkshire, who was the first British armed forces personnel to be killed in the Gulf War in 2003.}

Underlying the failed Basra strategy, too, was a flawed British assumption that they were good at counter-insurgency. We understand the natives, the generals would tell you — unlike those brutal, clumsy Americans. But smiles and handshakes could never alone have worked. Even previous peace support operations, such as Bosnia, had only been resolved by the use, or threat, of sufficient force.

The Americans were indeed appallingly brutal, to begin with, but they learned, and they changed — and, unlike us, they didn’t give up. They did surge men and resources; and in the end, helped by the overreach of their enemies, they did at least in part prevail. Both countries suffered political humiliation in Iraq. But only Britain was defeated militarily.

The clear lesson from Iraq was that you should do something properly, or not at all. But in Afghanistan, Britain’s generals repeated the same half-baked, penny-packet approach, the same self-delusion about their rapport with the locals, and drew the same contempt from their American allies.

General Benjamin Freakley, the main US commander in southern and eastern Afghanistan at the beginning of Britain’s campaign, admits that he was “scathing” to the British about their efforts in Helmand province. He said he warned especially strongly against Britain’s “disastrous” tactic of sending small groups of soldiers to far-flung “platoon houses,” sitting ducks for the Taliban. The practice was finally changed, but not before dozens of British lives were needlessly lost. These were operational decisions, nothing to do with British politicians — some of whom, indeed, were aghast at their generals’ recklessness.

The irony of Iraq is that an operation intended to strengthen the Anglo-US “special relationship,” the bar to which the British diplomatic and military establishment so desperately clings, did the exact opposite.

Basra cost us much respect in the Pentagon. In the leaked Iraq interview transcripts, the British brass complain that the overall US commander, General Rick Sanchez, never visited and never called: he didn’t, they complained, even install a secure phone link with them. Britain’s chief of staff, Colonel JK Tanner, likened the Americans to “a group of Martians”, saying: “Despite our so-called 'special relationship,’ I reckon we were treated no differently to the Portuguese.”

Soon, in Afghanistan, we will declare victory and leave. But it seems unlikely that we will leave much lasting trace of our presence, or much in return for the 440 British lives so far sacrificed there. And unlike the politicians of Iraq, the generals have moved on, reputations unsullied, to more lucrative work.

General Lamb, for instance, has recently taken to the media, extravagantly praising a dictatorial Arab regime which paid his lobbying company £1.5 million to “support [its] stance before the international community”. The Iraq war sandblasted the credibility of the British government, the intelligence agencies, and the diplomatic corps. But with the forces there is still, perhaps, an unwillingness among the media and public to confront reality; still a strong wish to believe that Britain is the best, the undefeated.

But for the sake of the self-respect and the very future of those forces, still among the proudest assets of this country, it is essential that they, and we, face the truth and learn the lessons.

The secret of Hugo Chavez

Grace Livingstone in The Independent

When I was a history student, I always wished I could hear one of the great orators of our time, a man or a woman who could sway a crowd and change the course of events with the power of their rhetoric. So I felt lucky to see Hugo Chavez, the revolutionary president of Venezuela, speak many times in Caracas.

What immediately struck you was his wit. His speeches were full of jokes and laughter, often misunderstood and misinterpreted by the foreign, particularly the American, media. He picked people out from the crowd, asking about their families or home towns, recalling a titbit of history about the place. He could switch from homespun banter to soaring rhetoric in an instant. He was learned and well read. US journalists were baffled when Chavez began to refer to George W Bush as "Mr Danger", but his Venezuelan audience picked up the literary allusion to the country's most famous novel, Dona Barbara – Mr Danger being an archetypal imperialist. But, most of all, Chavez was a teacher. I remember him exhorting his illiterate followers to learn to read. "Reading will liberate you," he told them and urged them to take part in his government's literacy drive in the shanty towns. Thousands did learn to read, many going on to become tutors themselves.

Chavez used the language of the street. The elite found him vulgar and shuddered that a lower-middle-class mixed-race soldier held the highest office in the land. But he spoke for tens of thousands of poor Venezuelans who had been overlooked for decades. Some said Chavez's language was inflammatory, but he put the country's poor on to the centre stage and told them: "You are the real Venezuela."

The coalition that supported Chavez included militant trade unionists and left-wing activists, but overwhelmingly it comprised thousands of poor Venezuelans who had never taken part in politics before. Precisely because Chavez was such a charismatic figure, the most startling fact about his Venezuela is usually overlooked – the upsurge of revolutionary grass-roots activism all over the country: hundreds of radio stations set up, popular councils, peasants' co-operatives, literacy circles, committees to bring water to shanty towns, a buzz of activity in place of despondency.

Chavez, of course, had faults. Despite being in office for years, he continued to rage like an opposition revolutionary against the powers that be. The privately owned TV stations in Venezuela were extraordinarily biased, exhorting people to protest against the elected president, misreporting a coup against Chavez and broadcasting cartoons when the coup began to unravel. So Chavez's broadsides against media magnates touched a nerve with many of his supporters, but when he began to berate individual journalists, it looked like bullying.

It was also understandable that Chavez was wary of the US. As a devourer of history books, he knew that the US had undermined and destabilised many left-wing Latin American governments; and, sure enough, the Bush administration embraced the coup against Chavez. But Chavez's desire to build a Third World coalition against the US "empire" led him to embrace many unsavoury leaders, from Gaddafi to Bashar al-Assad – an association that tarnished Venezuela which, in fact, held fair elections and respected human rights.

Perhaps the greatest error was that of his closest supporters who failed to criticise Chavez openly. Their behaviour did not reflect the vigorous debate taking place. Chavez's early death may help the Venezuelan revolution avoid the fate of Cuba – stultifying ossification – because an open debate about the future of the movement will be possible.

In his last few weeks, as Chavez lost his battle against cancer, he could be content that thousands of Venezuelans had learnt to stand up for their rights and that Latin America is now far more united than at any time in its history. He did not face the lonely and disillusioned end of his hero Simon Bolivar, the 19th-century Venezuelan independence leader, who died lamenting: "America is ungovernable. He who has served the revolution has ploughed the sea."

For all his flaws, Chavez will be remembered as one of the towering figures of Latin America history, alongside Salvador Allende, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and, of course, his revered Simon Bolivar.

Saeed Ajmal and the art of the pause

Why Pakistan's lead bowler is like an Argentinian football midfielder

SB Tang in Cricinfo

March 10, 2013

	Ajmal: master of the hook © Getty Images  Enlarge
Related Links Players/Officials: Saeed Ajmal Matches: South Africa v Pakistan at Cape Town Teams: Pakistan

In Argentina, they often speak of the importance of"the pause" both to their music and their football. On the football pitch, "the pause" is the moment when the designated playmaker, positioned between the lines of midfield and attack, places his foot on the ball, looks up, and pauses - in that moment, everything stops in the eye of the playmaker's mind. Out in the physical world, the expectant crowd holds their breath, waiting for the playmaker to pick out a pass.

In that instant, all futures are possible. The playmaker - one man in a team of 11 - chooses the pass to play, the path to take. He and he alone authors the team's collective fate. Like a Jedi Knight, a good playmaker must be capable of seeing things before they happen - the angled run the centre-forward is about to make behind his marking defender, the surge down the touchline that the full-back wants to make to create the overload, and perhaps even which of his own advancing attackers the opposition's spare defender intends to cover.

Thus, one man carries the weight of his team's destiny on his shoulders. That is why, in Argentinian football, the designated playmaker, the wearer of the No. 10 shirt, occupies such a special cultural place - he performs a duty that is almost sacred in its importance.

Watching Saeed Ajmal run through the world's best batting line-up in the second Test at Newlands last month, my mind turned to a different kind of pause - that in Ajmal's bowling action. Like most spinners, he approaches the crease at a smooth, comfortable canter, but unlike most spinners, just before he releases the ball, he pauses for a fraction of a second - like a claymation character in a Wallace & Gromit film - instead of driving his non-pivoting leg through the crease in one fluid motion, as the coaching manuals recommend.

However, there is a purpose behind this pause, a method to the seeming madness: the pause strips the batsman of one of his primary tools of attack and defence - his feet. Ordinarily a batsman using his feet to come down the pitch to a spinner will start his move just before or after the spinner releases the ball. By pausing just before the point of release, Ajmal makes it more likely that he will be able to see the batsman start to move before he releases the ball (thereby enabling him to change his delivery accordingly) and, more importantly, makes the batsman believe that Ajmal will be able to see him coming and adjust his delivery accordingly. This in turn causes the batsman to decide not to advance down the wicket at all, thereby removing a crucial weapon from his armoury.

In many ways phenomena like the pause are as characteristic of Pakistan's cricket culture as of Argentina's football culture. If Ajmal had suffered the misfortune of being English, there can be little doubt that the distinctive pause in his bowling action, not to mention his doosra, would have been coached out of him. As Maurice Holmes, the English mystery spinner unjustly hounded out of the English professional game at the age of 22, explained: "There will always be the English view, that something different is not necessarily something good. There are people who tend to take the traditional view that things can and should only be done in one way."

By contrast, in Australia and on the subcontinent, the finest cricketers are largely self-taught and allowed, if not encouraged, by their coaches to do what comes naturally to them, to trust their homespun techniques, to express their unique and abundant god-given talents. As Muttiah Muralitharan explained to the Cricketerrecently: "In Sri Lanka we find so many unique bowlers because we bowl naturally and are not over-coached." In Australia, Shane Warne had in Terry Jenner a coach and mentor who gave him the freedom to bowl naturally, even when that involved a substantial deviation from technical orthodoxy.

	Ajmal simultaneously functions as both strike bowler and workhorse, artist and blue-collar labourer

At this moment Ajmal is 35 years of age and at the very peak of his powers. At Newlands he produced match figures of 10 for 147. The number and identity of the wickets were impressive in themselves, the exquisite manner of their extraction even more so. During South Africa's successful final-innings chase, Jacques Kallis, arguably the finest allrounder in history, and Faf du Plessis, among the form batsmen in world cricket, were left pinioned to their crease, like the hapless, scripted victims of a WWE cage match, after being trapped plumb in front by flat, fast offbreaks. Indeed, such was the thrall in which Ajmal held the South African batsmen, we were treated to the sight of AB de Villiers doing a decent Mesut Özil impersonation, his eyes nearly popping out of his skull as he tried to decipher one of Ajmal's deliveries from the non-striker's end.

The comparison of the pause in Ajmal's bowling with the pause in Argentinian football is apposite in several respects, not least of which is the nomenclature: in Argentina, the designated playmaker is known as theenganche - literally, "the hook". How apt. For Ajmal, like all masters of the art of spin bowling, doesn't just reel in his hooked catch - no, he personally baits the hook, dangles it before his intended catch, induces the bite and then gleefully reels in his victim.

There is no better example of this than his dismissal of Hashim Amla in the second innings at Newlands. Amla was well set and cruising serenely on 54 not out, having helped steer South Africa to 146 for 3, within touching distance of their victory target of 182. Ajmal tossed one up, wide of off, nice and high above Amla's eyeline, giving him the false comfort of off-driving him for four - and the crowd the opportunity to derive aesthetic pleasure from the shot. Ajmal's next ball was just a tad higher and a fraction slower. Not even a batsman of Amla's class could resist such a delectable temptation. He unfurled his gorgeous, trademark, flourishing cover drive… and connected with nothing but air. The ball, a conventional offbreak dropping steeply, sailed through Amla's wide open gate and clipped the bails over middle and off. Amla, as good a batsman as there is right now, was left floundering and grasping for something just out of his reach, like a child straining on tiptoe to reach a jar of lollies stored on the high shelf in the kitchen.

Much like the enganche, in the moment of the pause, Ajmal carries the enormous weight of his team's fate, if not on his shoulders then certainly in his long, supple sculptor's fingers. Ajmal is not quite the sole wicket-taker in the way that the enganche is the sole creator, but there is no doubt that in the current Pakistan Test XI he is far and away the primary wicket-taker. Ajmal took took ten of the 16 South African wickets that fell in the Cape Town Test match. When Pakistan beat the world's then No. 1 Test team in the UAE in 2012, he took 24 of the 60 English wickets that fell. At Newlands, the only bowling support that Pakistan could muster for Ajmal came in the form of a 34-year-old "fast-medium" opening bowler who bowls slower than Australia's current wicketkeeper; a raw, no-ball prone, seven-foot-one-inch giant making his Test debut, and a solid one-day bowler whose Test bowling average, after nearly 50 Tests, remains stuck in the mid-30s.

Thus the comparison of Ajmal with the enganche is inapposite in one crucial respect. The enganche in the classic Argentinian 4-3-1-2 formation is neither a leader nor a hard labourer; rather, as Hugo Asch put it, he "is an artist", "a romantic hero, a poet, a misunderstood genius with the destiny of a myth" who "only works under shelter, with a court in his thrall and an environment that protects him from the evils of this world". Indeed, that is the very purpose of the 4-3-1-2 formation - to protect the enganche. The bank of three behind him performs the hard physical labour of tackling, running, chasing and harrying for him, so that he is free to create art. Leadership is provided not by the enganche, but by hard-running, hard-tackling holding midfielders, such as Javier Mascherano in Argentina's 2010 World Cup team, or robust defenders, such as Roberto Perfumo in Argentina's 1966 World Cup team.

Ajmal, by contrast, is the very definition of a leader and a hard labourer. There are no other world-class bowlers in the current Pakistan Test XI to carry his water for him. He simultaneously functions as both strike bowler and workhorse, artist and blue-collar labourer.

When he claimed his sixth South African first-innings wicket at Newlands Test with a classic offspinner's delivery - a slower, flighted offbreak pitching well outside the left-hander Dean Elgar's off stump, which invited the drive and duly drew the edge to slip - Ramiz Raja said on commentary: "He's a champion, Saeed Ajmal."

That he is.

Sebastian Faulks to introduce PG Wodehouse to a new generation

 

There never was a more self-deprecating natural-born genius than Pelham Grenville Wodehouse Photo: Getty Images

By Matthew Norman

8:06PM GMT 08 Mar 2013

5 Comments

Were there such a medal as the Literary Victoria Cross, awarded to writers who show valour far beyond the call of duty in the face of the enemy, Sebastian Faulks would be nipping to Moss Bros this morning for the tails and topper preparatory to an appointment at the Palace.

Faulks has taken the single most courageous decision the world of letters has ever known, and the enemy is on the march. Dissident writers in the Soviet Union who risked their freedom and lives clearly deserve the admiration of history. Compared with the brutality that awaits the author of Birdsong for agreeing to write a Jeeves and Wooster novel at the behest of the PG Wodehouse estate, however, 17 years on the cabbage and maggot soup diet in Siberia’s least well-appointed salt mine shrinks into the equivalent of a minor train delay on a branch line near Truro.

One literary critic has already described Faulks as hubristic, and an avalanche of outrage awaits as countless Wodehouse addicts metaphorically flash him one of those Aunt Agatha glares that can open an oyster at a dozen paces. If not today, the space above this column may before long host one or two angry thoughts on the matter, and any of you whose missives appear on this page should take satisfaction from that. “Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers,” as Plum himself once observed. “Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.”

There never was a more self-deprecating natural born genius than Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, whose appreciation of his own oeuvre lay in direct inverse proportion to the rapture enjoyed by its readers. He would probably be flattered that so gifted a novelist is to publish Jeeves and The Wedding Bells in November, though if he was peeved he would be infinitely too polite to let on.

Others will be less constrained by courtesy over what, given the godly status accorded him by right-thinking people, will strike them as outright sacrilege. There might be less resistance if Faulks, thinking better of the project, decided instead to pastiche the King James Bible in the style of Irvine Welsh. 

One understands the distress. It was one thing for Faulks to write a James Bond novel. No one ever described Ian Fleming, for all his story-telling gifts, as the most influential novelist in the language, as Auberon Waugh and others said of Wodehouse. Faulks himself refers to him as “inimitable”, though that barely hints at the peerlessness of Wodehouse’s limitless capacity for intricate plotting, vibrant characterisation and, above all, producing vast quantities of the most elegant, exquisite and consistently hilarious English prose.

One understands why many will be less than gruntled at the news. On reading it, to thieve from the master again, I examined my mind. It boggled. But on reflection I think that this is a good thing.

Back in the Seventies, when my early adolescent self fell insanely in love with Psmith, Ukridge, Mr Mulliner, The Oldest Member, Blandings Castle and especially Jeeves and Wooster, his Edwardian phraseology, sensibilities and the distant world he romanticises were faintly familiar from contact with elderly relatives, and even from Brian Johnston wittering wonderfully away on Test Match Special like a superannuated Wooster.

Today, Wodehouse is literally a closed book to the young. Book sales are heart-rendingly minute, presumably because his magically self-contained universe is 

off-puttingly remote to those who cannot imagine this country in the hands of a bunch of public schoolboys whose idea of ultimate merriment is throwing bread rolls at one another in a private dining club.

Once anyone of taste so much as dips into a novel, they will instantly be hooked. The difficult bit is getting them to open a book in the first place, and if as popular and well regarded a contemporary writer as Faulks can break that ice for those to whom Wodehouse’s escapist innocence seems irrelevant in the comedic era of Frankie Boyle, perhaps the flame will be reignited.

Reinterpreting wildly adored fictional characters is a colossal challenge, but it can be done. Admittedly on telly rather than in print, Steven Moffat has managed it astoundingly well with Sherlock Holmes, transplanting him into the Baker Street of today while cleaving absolutely to the spirit of Conan Doyle and the core of the character. Whether Faulks can come close to replicating that miraculous reinvention we will learn in the autumn, but he should be congratulated for having the guts to have a crack.

The influence of Wodehouse on our popular culture cannot be exaggerated. At the more recognisable end of the Wodehousian spectrum, you hear echoes in the plummy tones of Stephen Fry. “Without Wodehouse, I am not sure that I would be a tenth of what I am today – whatever that may be,” wrote the definitive television Jeeves. But he is equally audible in the Deptford brogue of the glorious Danny Baker on Radio 5 Live football shows. “It changed my life finding Wodehouse,” as Baker put it, “and gave me the language and a licence to be ludicrous. Someone who was the smartest man around and chose to write the dumbest books around – that was the key that unlocked the door.”

“Dumbest” is hardly a superlative to please every Wodehouse fan, yet the point is sound. Everybody deserves access to arguably the greatest, and surely the most joyous, English prose stylist of all time. If Sebastian Faulks is the locksmith who opens that door to a new generation, regardless of his own efforts, he will have earned more than that Literary VC.

Hugo Chávez knew that his revolution depended on women

And he wasn't the only one. Presidents of Tanzania and Haiti have both benefited from making women central to progress

• Selma James and Nina López
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 8 March 2013 19.15 GMT

Hugo Chavez with his supporters in 2009. Photograph: Prensa PSUV/EPA

The funeral of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela took place on International Women's Day – a fitting day of departure for "the president of the poor" who was loved by millions, especially by women, the poorest.

When Chávez was elected in 1998, the grassroots movement took a leap in power, and women in particular were empowered. Women were the first into the streets against the 2002 US-backed coup; their mobilisation saved the revolution. When asked why, woman after woman said: "Chávez is us, he is our son." He was an extension of who they were as strugglers for survival.

Chávez soon learnt that the revolution he led depended on women, and said so: "Only women have the passion and the love to make the revolution." He acknowledged that the "missions" – the new social services which were at the heart of his popularity and which the state funded but did not run – were mainly created and run by grassroots neighbourhood women.

In 2006, when announcing the partial implementation of Article 88 of the new constitution recognising caring work as productive – a breakthrough worldwide – Chávez said: "[Women] work so hard raising their children, ironing, washing, preparing food … giving [their children] an orientation … This was never recognised as work yet it is such hard work! ... Now the revolution puts you first, you too are workers, you housewives, workers in the home."

Chávez was not the first movement leader who went on to head the government, to have understood women's centrality to creating the new society they were striving to build.

Half a century ago, Julius Nyerere, leader of Tanzania's independence struggle and its first president, aimed his programme for development at the elimination of two ills: women's inequality and poverty. He said: "Women who live in villages work harder than anyone in Tanzania," working "in the fields and in the homes".

"The truth is that in the villages the women work very hard. At times they work for 12 or 14 hours a day. They even work on Sundays and public holidays." Whereas the village men "are on leave half their lives".

Nyerere's ujaama or "African socialism" – self-reliance and co-operation – was to keep Tanzania independent, by enabling it to refuse foreign loans. He insisted men must do their share. Equity was a question not only of justice but of economic necessity and political independence.

Encouraged by Nyerere, in one region 17, ujamaa villages created a communal society based on equity among women and men, children and adults – all contributed what they could and all shared equally in the wealth produced. Their extraordinary society was destroyed by Nyerere's power-hungry colleagues against his will, but it showed us what is possible.

Closer to Venezuela, women gained recognition under Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's first democratically elected president (1990 and 2000). Determined to tackle extreme poverty and injustice, Aristide created a Ministry of Women's Affairs, appointed women to ministerial posts, supported girl domestic workers, and survivors of military rape. As in Venezuela, women were the main organisers and beneficiaries of literacy and health programmes; the rise in the minimum wage benefited them especially – sweatshop workers are mainly women.

Young people's love for Aristide is legendary, but women's devotion has been as constant. Two months after the devastating 2010 earthquake, women collected 20,000 signatures in three days demanding President Aristide's return from exile – they needed him for reconstruction. A year later he was back, not as president but as educator, reopening the medical school he had founded for poor students, which the coup had closed.

In Bolivia, indigenous women were recognised as central to the mass mobilisations which propelled Evo Morales into the presidency. These included the "water wars" which drove the multinational Bechtel out of Bolivia (they privatised the water and criminalised people who collected rain water). In 2008 the women were prominent in surrounding Congress for several days while the new constitution was debated; the white parliamentary elite intended to absent themselves to prevent a vote. The blockade forced them to sleep in the building till the vote was taken. That constitution heralded a new level of power for women – from pay equity to recognition for the economic value of caring work.

As the president of the poor is laid to rest, the historic Operation Condor trial opens in Argentina, tackling the co-ordinated campaign of state terror of former Latin American dictatorships. We must recall a little-known aspect of Chávez's legacy. Venezuela's oil revenue supported Argentina's Presidents Nestor and Cristina Kirchner, enabling them to pass laws removing the military's immunity from prosecution. The Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who led the 1983 overthrow of the dictatorship, and who had long campaigned for justice for the thousands the dictatorships raped, murdered and disappeared, have long paid tribute to Chávez – a most unusual military man.

They, like women all over South America and beyond, will be watching anxiously to see that the gains of the Bolivarian revolution are not undermined.

Britain: a nation in decay

The UK's problems go far deeper than the cuts agenda. It simply can't produce enough to revive its ailing economy

• 
• • Ha-Joon Chang
  • The Guardian, Friday 8 March 2013 21.00 GMT

‘Despite the huge incentive to export created by a devalued pound, Britain is still running trade deficits because it has lost the productive capacity to respond.’ Photograph: Alamy

David Cameron's speech on the economy this week, and the reactions to it, have again confirmed that the British debate on economic policy is getting nowhere. The coalition government keeps repeating that it has to cut spending in order to cut deficits, no matter what. The opposition has been at pains to explain – as a teacher may do to a particularly slow or obstinate child – that trying to cut deficits by cutting spending in a stagnant economy is a largely self-defeating exercise, as it reduces growth and thus tax revenue. And Friday's astonishing letter from Robert Chote, chairman of the non-partisan Office for Budget Responsibility, contradicting the prime minister and reminding him of the ambiguous impact of spending cuts on deficits, has lent further weight to the opposition argument.

In reality, though, the coalition government isn't as stupid or stubborn as it appears. It is sticking to its plan A because spending cuts are not about deficits but about rolling back the welfare state. So no amount of evidence is going to change its position on cuts.

Lost in this cross-wired debate is the issue of the long-term future of the economy. Britain has been finding it difficult to recover from the financial crisis not just because of its austerity policy but also because of its eroding ability to engage in high-productivity activities. This problem is most tellingly manifested in the country's inability to generate a trade surplus despite the huge devaluation of sterling since 2008.

Compared with its height in 2007, the pound has been devalued about 30% against the dollar, 50% against the yen, and 20% against the struggling euro. Yet despite the huge incentive to export created by such devaluation, Britain is still running trade deficits because it has lost the productive capacity to respond.

Despite the devaluation, Britain's service exports have fallen – average annual service exports for 2008-11 were 8% lower than for 2005-07. This may be understandable, given the poor state of its financial sector – rocked by one scandal after another and hemmed in by a slow tightening of global financial regulation.

However, manufacturing exports, which were supposed to make up the shortfall created by the services sector, also fell by 8% after the devaluation. This is highly unusual. For example, back when South Korea had a devaluation of similar scale after its 1997 financial crisis (the won, its currency, was devalued by 35% against the dollar), the country's manufacturing exports were 15% higher (comparing the 1998-2001 average to 1995-97).

The only reason the British balance of payments situation has not been worse is the large increase in primary commodity exports – oil, minerals and food. These were on average 22% higher in 2008-11 than in 2005-07. In other words, since the crisis the British economy has been moving backwards in terms of its sophistication as a producer.

All of this means that, without addressing the underlying decay in productive capabilities, Britain cannot fix its ailing economy. To deal with this problem, it urgently needs to develop a long-term productive strategy through a broad-based public consultation involving not just the government and private sector firms, but trade unions, educational institutions and research institutes.

The strategy should first carefully identify the industries, and the underlying technologies, that will be the future motor of the economy and then provide them with the necessary support. This could be in the form of subsidies for R&D, loan guarantees for small firms, or preferences in government procurement, and should be targeted at "strategic" industries, although they could also be in the form of policies that are apparently not industry-specific.

For example, infrastructural investment needs to be co-ordinated with the broader industrial strategy. Infrastructure is by definition location-specific, so depending on the industries you want to promote, you will have to build different types of it in different places. Similarly with education and skills. Without there being some national strategy, it is difficult for educators to know what kinds of engineers or technicians to produce, and for potential students to know what professions to study for.

John Maynard Keynes once famously said that in the long run we are all dead. But a lot of us have to live for a while yet. A series of short-run policies, whether based on the coalition policy of spending cuts and loose monetary policy or on the opposition policy of increased government spending, isn't going to address the challenges facing the British economy. It is time to think for the long term.

Tariq Ali: Hugo Chávez and me

The late president of Venezuela, who I have met many times, will be remembered by his supporters as a lover of literature, a fiery speaker and a man who fought for his people and won

• 
• • Tariq Ali
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 6 March 2013 17.07 GMT

Chávez, director Oliver Stone and Tariq Ali at the Venice film festival in 2009. Photograph: Damien Meyer/AFP/Getty Images

Once I asked whether he preferred enemies who hated him because they knew what he was doing or those who frothed and foamed out of ignorance. He laughed. The former was preferable, he explained, because they made him feel that he was on the right track. Hugo Chávez's death did not come as a surprise, but that does not make it easier to accept. We have lost one of the political giants of the post-communist era. Venezuela, its elites mired in corruption on a huge scale, had been considered a secure outpost of Washington and, at the other extreme, the Socialist International. Few thought of the country before his victories. After 1999, every major media outlet of the west felt obliged to send a correspondent. Since they all said the same thing (the country was supposedly on the verge of a communist-style dictatorship) they would have been better advised to pool their resources.

I first met him in 2002, soon after the military coup instigated by Washington and Madrid had failed and subsequently on numerous occasions. He had asked to see me during the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He inquired: "Why haven't you been to Venezuela? Come soon." I did. What appealed was his bluntness and courage. What often appeared as sheer impulsiveness had been carefully thought out and then, depending on the response, enlarged by spontaneous eruptions on his part. At a time when the world had fallen silent, when centre-left and centre-right had to struggle hard to find some differences and their politicians had become desiccated machine men obsessed with making money, Chávez lit up the political landscape.

He appeared as an indestructible ox, speaking for hours to his people in a warm, sonorous voice, a fiery eloquence that made it impossible to remain indifferent. His words had a stunning resonance. His speeches were littered with homilies, continental and national history, quotes from the 19th-century revolutionary leader and president of VenezuelaSimón Bolívar, pronouncements on the state of the world and songs. "Our bourgeoisie are embarrassed that I sing in public. Do you mind?" he would ask the audience. The response was a resounding "No". He would then ask them to join in the singing and mutter, "Louder, so they can hear us in the eastern part of the city." Once before just such a rally he looked at me and said: "You look tired today. Will you last out the evening?" I replied: "It depends on how long you're going to speak." It would be a short speech, he promised. Under three hours.

The Bolívarians, as Chávez's supporters were known, offered a political programme that challenged the Washington consensus: neo-liberalism at home and wars abroad. This was the prime reason for the vilification of Chávez that is sure to continue long after his death.

Politicians like him had become unacceptable. What he loathed most was the contemptuous indifference of mainstream politicians in South America towards their own people. The Venezuelan elite is notoriously racist. They regarded the elected president of their country as uncouth and uncivilised, a zambo of mixed African and indigenous blood who could not be trusted. His supporters were portrayed on private TV networks as monkeys. Colin Powell had to publicly reprimand the US embassy in Caracas for hosting a party where Chávez was portrayed as a gorilla.

Was he surprised? "No," he told me with a grim look on his face. "I live here. I know them well. One reason so many of us join the army is because all other avenues are sealed." No longer. He had few illusions. He knew that local enemies did not seethe and plot in a vacuum. Behind them was the world's most powerful state. For a few moments he thought Obama might be different. The military coup in Honduras disabused him of all such notions.

He had a punctilious sense of duty to his people. He was one of them. Unlike European social democrats he never believed that any improvement in humankind would come from the corporations and the bankers and said so long before the Wall Street crash of 2008. If I had to pin a label on him, I would say that he was a socialist democrat, far removed from any sectarian impulses and repulsed by the self-obsessed behaviour of various far-left sects and the blindness of their routines. He said as much when we first met.

 Chávez greets supporters during a political gathering in 2006. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

The following year in Caracas I questioned him further on the Bolívarian project. What could be accomplished? He was very clear; much more so than some of his over-enthusiastic supporters: ''I don't believe in the dogmatic postulates of Marxist revolution. I don't accept that we are living in a period of proletarian revolutions. All that must be revised. Reality is telling us that every day. Are we aiming in Venezuela today for the abolition of private property or a classless society? I don't think so. But if I'm told that because of that reality you can't do anything to help the poor, the people who have made this country rich through their labour – and never forget that some of it was slave labour – then I say: 'We part company.' I will never accept that there can be no redistribution of wealth in society. Our upper classes don't even like paying taxes. That's one reason they hate me. We said: 'You must pay your taxes.' I believe it's better to die in battle, rather than hold aloft a very revolutionary and very pure banner, and do nothing … That position often strikes me as very convenient, a good excuse … Try and make your revolution, go into combat, advance a little, even if it's only a millimetre, in the right direction, instead of dreaming about utopias."

I remember sitting next to an elderly, modestly attired woman at one of his public rallies. She questioned me about him. What did I think? Was he doing well? Did he not speak too much? Was he not too rash at times? I defended him. She was relieved. It was his mother, worried that perhaps she had not brought him up as well as she should have done: "We always made sure that he read books as a child." This passion for reading stayed with him. History, fiction and poetry were the loves of his life: "Like me, Fidel is an insomniac. Sometimes we're reading the same novel. He rings at 3am and asks: 'Well, have you finished? What did you think?' And we argue for another hour.'"

It was the spell of literature that in 2005 led him to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Cervantes's great novel in a unique fashion. The ministry of culture reprinted a million copies of Don Quixote and distributed them free to a million poor, but now literate, households. A quixotic gesture? No. The magic of art can't transform the universe, but it can open up a mind. Chávez was confident that the book would be read now or later.

The closeness to Castro has been portrayed as a father-son relationship. This is only partially the case. Last year a huge crowd had gathered outside the hospital in Caracas, where Chávez was meant to be recuperating from cancer treatment, and their chants got louder and louder. Chávez ordered a loudspeaker system on the rooftop. He then addressed the crowd. Watching this scene on Telesur in Havana, Castro was shocked. He rang the director of the hospital: "This is Fidel Castro. You should be sacked. Get him back into bed and tell him I said so."

Above the friendship, Chávez saw Castro and Che Guevara in a historical frame. They were the 20th-century heirs of Bolívar and his friend Antonio José de Sucre. They tried to unite the continent, but it was like ploughing the sea. Chávez got closer to that ideal than the quartet he admired so much. His successes in Venezuela triggered a continental reaction: Bolivia and Ecuador saw victories. Brazil under Lula and Dilma did not follow the social model but refused to allow the west to pit them against each other. It was a favoured trope of western journalists: Lula is better than Chávez. Only last year Lula publicly declared that he supported Chávez, whose importance for "our continent" should never be underestimated.

The image of Chávez most popular in the west was that of an oppressive caudillo. Had this been true I would wish for more of them. The Bolívarian constitution, opposed by the Venezuelan opposition, its newspapers and TV channels and the local CNN, plus western supporters, was approved by a large majority of the population. It is the only constitution in the world that affords the possibility of removing an elected president from office via a referendum based on collecting sufficient signatures. Consistent only in their hatred for Chávez, the opposition tried to use this mechanism in 2004 to remove him. Regardless of the fact that many of the signatures were those of dead people, the Venezuelan government decided to accept the challenge.

I was in Caracas a week before the vote. When I met Chávez at the Miraflores palace he was poring over the opinion polls in great detail. It might be close. "And if you lose?" I asked. "Then I will resign," he replied without hesitation. He won.

 Chávez on the streets of Cabimas in September last year. Photograph: Juan Barreto/AFP/Getty Images

Did he ever tire? Get depressed? Lose confidence? "Yes," he replied. But it was not the coup attempt or the referendum. It was the strike organised by the corrupted oil unions and backed by the middle-classes that worried him because it would affect the entire population, especially the poor: "Two factors helped sustain my morale. The first was the support we retained throughout the country. I got fed up sitting in my office. So with one security guard and two comrades I drove out to listen to people and breathe better air. The response moved me greatly. A woman came up to me and said: 'Chávez follow me, I want to show you something.' I followed her into her tiny dwelling. Inside, her husband and children were waiting for the soup to be cooked. 'Look at what I'm using for fuel … the back of our bed. Tomorrow I'll burn the legs, the day after the table, then the chairs and doors. We will survive, but don't give up now.' On my way out the kids from the gangs came and shook hands. 'We can live without beer. You make sure you screw these motherfuckers.'"

What was the inner reality of his life? For anyone with a certain level of intelligence, of character and culture, his or her natural leanings, emotional and intellectual, hang together, constitute a whole not always visible to everyone. He was a divorcee, but affection for his children and grandchildren was never in doubt. Most of the women he loved, and there were a few, described him as a generous lover, and this was long after they had parted.

What of the country he leaves behind? A paradise? Certainly not. How could it be, given the scale of the problems? But he leaves behind a very changed society in which the poor felt they had an important stake in the government. There is no other explanation for his popularity. Venezuela is divided between his partisans and detractors. He died undefeated, but the big tests lie ahead. The system he created, a social democracy based on mass mobilisations, needs to progress further. Will his successors be up to the task? In a sense, that is the ultimate test of the Bolívarian experiment.

Of one thing we can be sure. His enemies will not let him rest in peace. And his supporters? His supporters, the poor throughout the continent and elsewhere, will see him as a political leader who promised and delivered social rights against heavy odds; as someone who fought for them and won.